I grew up reading her face like a sentence I was always failing to finish. Her corrections, her distance, the way her gaze cooled when I spoke about my dreams—back then, it all felt like punishment. After the funeral, the quiet in the house was almost violent. That was when I found the velvet box, my initials etched into the silver teardrop that had never touched my skin. The letter beside it didn’t soften her; it made her human.

She wrote of a love she’d been forced to leave, of paintings she abandoned for respectability, of how my hunger for more scraped against the doors she’d nailed shut in herself. I had never been her enemy; I had been her reminder. Opening The Teardrop, a gallery for women whose lives were half-told, didn’t redeem our past. It reframed it. Now, when the pendant rests warm at my collarbone, it doesn’t erase the hurt. It simply says: finish what I could not.