I met Emmanuel on a Wednesday, one of those pale afternoons when the wind carried the scent of wet cobblestone and roasted chestnuts. The hospital had released me temporarily after a bout of fever, and I wandered to the old quay near the port. The sea was restless that day, green and gray in turns, as though unable to decide whether to rage or to rest. I remember standing there, watching the gulls circle above the boats, when he spoke.
"You're staring at the water like it owes you an apology," he said. His voice had a rough, grainy music to it, the kind that clings to memory. When I turned, he was there—tall, sun-bronzed, with a painter's hands and a half-buttoned shirt. He had a camera slung around his neck and eyes the color of dark soil after rain.
"Maybe it does," I replied. I didn't smile, but I didn't walk away either.
He laughed quietly, like someone who didn't expect to be understood. "Then it must owe me one too," he said, stepping closer to the railing. "I've been chasing the same picture for weeks, but the sea won't keep still for me."
He lifted his camera then, pointed it not at the water but at me. "May I?"
I hesitated. I had never liked being seen—not since I left home, not since the headlines about me, not since you, Father, stopped calling my name with love. Yet, something about his gaze disarmed me. It wasn't curiosity; it was recognition, as if he had been waiting for me to walk into his frame all along.
So I nodded.
He took one photo. Just one. And in that click, something changed.
We met again two days later at the corner café near Rue Des Lys. He claimed it was coincidence, but his grin betrayed intention. "You owe me coffee," he said. "For stealing my best photograph."
"You never asked for payment," I replied.
"I'm asking now."
That was how it began, our rhythm, simple and unpredictable. We sat outside, the world moving past us in soft motion: waiters shouting orders, the hiss of espresso machines, the perfume of strangers drifting between tables. He told me he was a freelance photographer, half French, half Nigerian, raised in Lyon. His mother had died early, his father remarried, and he had run away at seventeen to chase the world through a camera lens.
I told him I was from a place where fathers built walls higher than heaven and called it love. He laughed, not mockingly but tenderly, as if he understood the architecture of pain.
From then, we began to see each other often. Sometimes at the café, sometimes near the water, sometimes on long walks up the hill where the city spilled into the sea. Emmanuel taught me to look at things differently: the shape of clouds, the cracks in statues, the way light bent over broken glass. He said the world was full of hidden faces, waiting for someone patient enough to find them.
One evening, we climbed the slope behind the hospital, where wildflowers grew despite the rocky soil. The sun was folding itself into the horizon, bleeding orange and gold. Emmanuel spread a small blanket and unpacked two paper boxes of food.
"I thought you said you couldn't cook," I teased.
"I can't," he said. "But the woman who sells these at the corner thinks I'm charming, so she gives me double portions."
We laughed. I had almost forgotten what laughter felt like how it rose from the chest and made you feel lighter, freer, as though something in you had been unshackled.
He handed me a fork. "Tell me something true," he said suddenly.
"What kind of truth?"
"The kind you've never told anyone."
I stared at him for a while, then said quietly, "My father thinks I'm dead."
He didn't flinch, didn't press. He only looked at me, really looked, as if memorizing the shape of my pain. "Then you must be a ghost," he said softly. "And I must be the fool who fell in love with one."
It was Emmanuel who gave me back the sense of being alive. He filled my small room with laughter, with books, with the scent of paint and mint tea. He took me on his photo trips across the countryside: little villages with red roofs and lavender fields stretching endlessly. He'd stop the car to take pictures of random things, an old man fixing a bicycle, a woman feeding pigeons, a boy chasing a kite.
He once pointed the lens at me as I sat in a field of yellow daisies. "You don't smile enough," he said.
"I forgot how."
"Then I'll remind you."
He did. Over and over again, until my laughter became real, until the world seemed less cruel.
In his arms, I found a kind of peace I hadn't known since childhood. We made plans—small ones at first. He wanted to hold an exhibition. I wanted to study art therapy. We spoke about moving somewhere quieter, maybe Tuscany or Lisbon, places with gentle winters and old, forgiving walls.
Sometimes I'd tell him about you, Father—how proud and formidable you were, how the world bent to your will, how I used to wait for your approval like sunlight that never came. Emmanuel would listen, then take my hand and say, "Maybe he did love you. Some men just don't know how to show it."
I wanted to believe that. I tried.
But peace is a fragile guest, it never stays too long.
It started with a letter, a white envelope with a blue emblem. It found me one morning in our shared apartment, slipped under the door. I knew before opening it that it carried bad news. My residency permit had expired, and the renewal application had been denied. The letter was brief, bureaucratic, merciless. I had sixty days to leave Monaco.
Emmanuel paced the room, cursing under his breath. "We'll appeal," he said. "I know people."
I shook my head. "You don't understand. I'm already under a medical watchlist. They'll find me if I stay."
He turned to me, eyes fierce. "Then I'll come with you. Wherever you go."
"Don't be foolish," I whispered. "You have your career, your home"
"You're my home," he said.
I wanted to believe him, but somewhere deep down I knew love couldn't shield me from the machinery of the world. The next weeks blurred into each other hospital checkups, paperwork, sleepless nights. My body began to fail me again: breath shorter, fever recurring, pain crawling beneath my ribs like an animal looking for a way out.
I tried to hide it from him, but Emmanuel noticed everything. He stopped taking photography gigs, spent hours by my bedside. One night, I woke up to find him crying quietly, his hand clutching mine.
"Don't you dare leave me," he said.
I smiled weakly. "You'll find another ghost to love."
He shook his head. "You're not a ghost. You're the proof that beauty can still live in broken things."
It was winter when everything fell apart. The sea turned steel gray, the streets froze, and the hospital swallowed me again. This time, I didn't come out.
Emmanuel came every day, his camera hanging like a charm around his neck. He brought flowers that withered before morning and read aloud from books he knew I loved. Sometimes, when I drifted between sleep and waking, I'd hear him whisper prayers under his breath, prayers I'd never heard him say before.
One afternoon, I told him to take a walk, to rest. He resisted but finally agreed. When he left, the room felt emptier than it ever had.
He didn't return that evening.
Nor the next.
It was on the third day that a nurse came in, her face pale. She didn't need to speak; I saw it in her eyes. The car had spun out of control on the icy road leading to the hospital. He hadn't survived.
The world stopped.
For days, I couldn't speak. The doctors said I refused food, that I stared at the wall for hours, unblinking. I remember none of it clearly—only the sound of the sea echoing in my head, that endless, ungrateful sea.
The camera was found intact. Inside it, the last photograph he ever took was of me, lying on the hospital bed, eyes half open, light falling across my face like a benediction.
Someone printed it for me and placed it by my bedside. I still have it here, Father. It's the only proof that I was once loved without condition.
---
After Emmanuel's death, something in me broke cleanly. The world lost color, sound, scent. I no longer feared dying; I only feared forgetting him. I started writing letters again—one for him, one for you, one for God, though I never decided which one would be mailed.
Some nights I'd dream of the sea, and he'd be there, standing on the shore, waving for me to come closer. He never spoke. He only waited, patient and kind, like the tide itself.
That was when I began to accept that my journey was ending too. The doctors called it resignation. I called it peace.
Now, as I write this, his photograph watches me from the table. His eyes still hold that same light, the light that once made me believe in life again. I like to think he's somewhere close, just beyond the veil, waiting beside my mother, maybe even Daniel.
And when the angel finally arrives, Father, I hope he carries me first to Emmanuel. I hope he lets me tell him that I kept his promise—that I remembered to smile.