Wings in closed skies

She sat in her glass office contemplating the sea, remembering her father covered in his blood, then imagining him standing in front of the gun barrels while counting in his mind the days he would not see her grow up. He missed a lot, no doubt: a first smile with new teeth, the first time she put on makeup, an awkward question about love, a first tear from a broken heart, a first joy of success, her wedding day while she cried because the wedding decor was not as it should be. But time no longer mattered to him now. Time stopped at this moment, this cold dawn where the smell of gunpowder mixes with the scent of Indian jasmine in the garden of the house. In his pocket, wrapped in a piece of blue silk, a letter he had not yet written to his daughter. A letter he wrote only in his mind, word for word, during the past three days in the cell. He knew he would never write it on paper, but he wanted it to be complete in his head before he died, as if ideas could travel through time and reach her when she was old enough to understand. "My beloved daughter," the letter began in his mind, "when you read this, you will be a woman, and you may not remember me much. But I want you to know that everything I did in my life passed through one question: what would I say to her if she asked me about this one day?"