The Scalpel Brought Her Back to Her Lover’s Lips

The clock read four in the morning.

Adriana was already awake. She had been for much longer than it had been before the alarm, ever since insomnia stopped being the exception and became a habit. She slipped on her sneakers, tied the laces like someone tying an anchor to the present, and went out into the empty street.

An exact hour of running. Only the thud of her soles against the asphalt, only the icy wind lapping at skin that no longer felt the cold. Only her mind, chasing a silence that never came.

At five she returned. In the courtyard she practiced fencing without an opponent, lunges into the air, repeating each movement as if she could beat thought into silence. She couldn’t. She never could.

At six she showered. White shirt, sober trousers, ID badge hanging at her neck, hair pulled back in a ponytail as tight as another military uniform. Adriana, the forensic pathologist. Adriana, the officer. Adriana, the woman who fled pain by burying herself in hours of work until she had no strength left even to cry.

The cold of the morgue was easier to bear than the cold of her empty bed. That was why she preferred being there.

She arrived at the building before any assistant. Not out of urgency, but because insomnia had dragged her to that door, and because she needed to remember who she was when no one was watching. She hung her military jacket on the rack, pulled on her lab coat, adjusted her gloves, and approached the first gurney without hesitation.

Two female bodies. Two young women. Not identified yet. The brutality, however, needed no file.

Body number one: multiple lacerations, old bruising. Body number two: clean incisions, a precise abdominal wound, almost surgical. Both women, dumped like trash.

Adriana closed her eyes for a moment. Not to pray. To steady the trembling inside.

Patricia had left her a note on the worktable. It said: “I have court. I’ll cover your field report this afternoon. P.S.: don’t shut yourself away so much. Even when the world hurts, there’s still light left.”

Adriana managed the smallest smile, the kind that never reached the eyes. Patricia knew more than she said, and still she left her alone, because she understood that Adriana worked best alone. Because she didn’t know how to do it any other way.

She turned on the recorder.

—Start of protocol. Time: seven thirty-four. Female victim. Approximately twenty-five years old…

The scalpel slid as if the hand guiding it wasn’t trembling inside. One, two, three cuts. The body spoke. It always spoke. You only had to know how to listen.

When she moved on to body number two, her hands were still steady, her face calm. But inside, an abyss was opening. It wasn’t the violence. It wasn’t the marks. It was memory.

Each incision tore open an old internal seam. And through that seam, as it always did, Renata came back.

***

Renata had a habit of biting her shoulder when she laughed. She remembered it so vividly she could almost feel it there, over the gurney, while the recorder kept running. That last afternoon, before the final fight, they had trained together in the academy gym, two full hours of fencing, until their uniforms were plastered to their backs. Afterward, in the locker room, Renata had cornered her against the cold tiles without a word.

—You owe me one —she had said, in that low voice she used only for her.

Adriana had felt Renata’s hot breath on her neck while Renata lowered the zipper of her jacket. Renata’s mouth traced her collarbone slowly, climbed to her jaw, and stopped just before the kiss, as she always stopped everything, so Adriana would be the one to close the last few millimeters.

Adriana closed them. She always closed them.

She kissed her with a hunger she allowed nowhere else in her life, with tongue, with teeth, with the urgency of knowing they had twenty minutes before someone came looking for them. Renata slid a hand beneath her T-shirt, brushed her nipples still taut from the cold air of the AC, and heard her breathe in that way only she knew how to pull from her.

—I love you —Renata whispered against her mouth.

—After the fight —she answered, smiling. It was their usual promise. After the fight we’ll talk. After the fight you’ll say it again. After the fight you won’t leave me.

They left the locker room laughing, still with each other’s taste on their tongues, dressed in street clothes, sweaty, believing they could still be happy.

And then the black van. The five men getting out. The brutal certainty Adriana had learned since childhood, the one her father had branded into her with fire: nothing you love is ever only yours.

That ambush was for me.

She remembered the first blow, the first struggle, the gun aimed, and Renata screaming.

—My love!

Then the shot. Not one. Two. Renata had thrown herself over her, pushing her, shielding her, becoming a shield. A target. An open body over hers.

Adriana had held her in her arms, had pressed both wounds with her bare hands, had felt warm blood slipping between her fingers until it soaked her shirt. She tried. She tried with all her strength. It wasn’t enough.

And the worst, the worst of all, wasn’t that. The worst was that when her father arrived he didn’t hug her, didn’t let her cry, didn’t allow her to collapse. He forced her to compete that same afternoon. The national final. And she won. As if a podium could cover two wounds that weren’t hers.

Since then, every time she opened a body, the thought came back with the same old stab. It shouldn’t have been you. It should have been me.

***

—…transverse incision of approximately fourteen centimeters, partial absence of the left kidney —she kept dictating, with the neutral voice she had spent years perfecting.

She rested her gloved fingers on the metal edge of the gurney, and the cold gave her something like reality back. The recorder kept rolling. Her left hand wasn’t trembling. Neither was her right.

But Helena was there too, lodged right in the fold of her chest, where she hadn’t wanted to touch herself for a week.

Helena had appeared three months earlier at a conference on forensic identification in victims of organized crime. She spoke to her in Spanish with a strange accent, mixed with traces of another language, and had the habit of looking her in the eyes a second longer than was socially comfortable. They drank lukewarm whiskey in the hotel bar until three in the morning. Neither of them could quite bring herself to go upstairs. Until Helena brushed the back of her hand over the table and asked, without smiling:

—Are you going to make me sleep alone again?

They went up.

Adriana wouldn’t let her turn on the light. She asked her to stay like that, dressed, against the wall, and lowered the zipper of her dress with the same slowness with which Renata had lowered a military jacket on her ten years earlier. But this time she wasn’t trembling from fear. She was trembling from allowing herself, for the first time in years, to feel.

Helena had a warm body, freckled shoulders, small breasts and nipples always a little darker than her fair skin suggested. Adriana knelt before her on the carpet of that nameless hotel and kissed the inside of her thighs until Helena had to brace herself against the wallpaper. Helena dug her fingers into the nape of her neck when she parted her legs with her tongue, and asked her, in an almost angry whisper, never to stop.

She didn’t stop. She made her come twice before moving up to her mouth, before letting herself be undressed, before accepting that she too could lose control.

That night they slept skin to skin. Helena told her before closing her eyes: “Don’t fall in love, pathologist. It’s not advisable.”

Adriana laughed without answering.

But a week had passed since Helena had left without explanation. A dry hug at the morgue door, a promise to call that never came, a flight to another country for a case that might not even have existed. And once again her father’s old voice, lodged at the nape of her neck like a splinter. Love is a weakness. If you love, protect. If you fail, own it.

Maybe it had been an impulse. Maybe Helena had used her. Or maybe it had been her, Adriana, who had failed once more to protect.

—What if Helena becomes a ghost too? —she whispered.

She swallowed. She couldn’t break. Not now.

She looked back at the body on the gurney. Transverse wound. Absence of a kidney. And then, without knowing why, she understood it. Pain always left a hole. But it also left a map. One that, if she learned to read it, could guide her back to herself.

She took up the scalpel again.

I’m not going to stop. Not for fear. Not for love. But I hope she comes back. Because for the first time since Renata, I allowed myself to imagine an after.

And even though silence reigned in the room, somewhere deep inside Adriana there vibrated a certainty as fine as a thread of light in the dark: love, when it was real, always found a way back.

Or so she wanted to believe.

Even if another part of her, smaller, older, more like her father’s voice, whispered the only question she didn’t dare answer.

What if what you had with Helena wasn’t as real as you let yourself believe?