Her fingers brushed over the musical box that rested on the ottoman bench in the living room. The box was the only object in the house that had remained unaltered over the years. It was made of turquoise ceramic decorated with small yellow stars and shaped into the form of a sleeping angel, whose wings of fire-forged clay embraced Teresa and all her sorrows.

It smelled of talcum powder and shattered dreams. She wound it up.

The melody flowed out in notes that sounded like the tinkling of a little bell. It had always seemed agonizingly beautiful to Teresa, a lullaby that made her think of stars immersed in an indigo sea, stretching beyond ephemeral, silver-lined clouds: the enigma of the universe, a mystery that had endured through billions of years.

Teresa was not religious, she didn’t really know what she believed in, but if she’d ever been asked for a sign, any sign, of some kind of divine presence in her life, she would have pointed at that sleeping angel, who hurt her with painful memories but also suffused her with a tenderness that heralded comfort.

She wondered if all that pain would finally mean something after she died: tiny fingers to hold, a soft cheek to kiss, the warmth of an angel she could finally look in the eye and cradle close to her heart.

No, she was never truly alone.

She allowed her melancholy to guide her steps as she moved from room to room, keeping time with that aching lullaby. In the bathroom, she undressed, averting her gaze from the shapeless body reflected in the mirror. After a quick shower, she prepared for her nightly ritual, retrieving from the cabinet her glucose meter and blood lancet. She inserted the needle and secured the cap. She set it to the length required to pierce her skin and pricked the edge of a fingertip. A few drops of dark blood onto the glucose test strip. Seconds later, a reassuring figure on the screen. She picked up an insulin pen. Needles again. After years of this daily torture, they had become her very own crown of thorns. She felt her thighs for a spot that wasn’t yet sore, and jabbed.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub for a time, looking at the tiles on the wall, then got up to tidy the room, concealing the traces of her illness inside the cabinet. She dressed wearily, as if the weight of the past few hours had made her body heavier than it actually was.

She went to the kitchen to make some dinner, something she could snack on while leafing through a book on the couch. Maybe she’d have a glass of wine with it, something to help her unwind and ease her into sleep.