For a whole year since her absence, Alessandra was a silent shadow. The pain was too sharp and mute to even attempt to express it. Then, in the second year, I tried to revive her face, and from my fingers emerged a portrait of her when she was young and smiling, as if I could capture the ghost of past happiness. In the third year, I struggled with the maturity of her face, with those contours nearing the old age that death had denied her. It was a futile and grueling work; months spent reshaping the same profile, obsessing over the same clay, without finding a moment of rest or peace. I emerged from the labyrinth with a self-portrait, finally breaking the Penelope's web of my grief. And now the couple is together again.