Gulgol

During her father’s wake, Ines is unsure whether to keep going with the things her father left behind or to stop everything and stay in her grief. In the days that follow, life turns into rituals—things done to honor the dead and to help the living keep going without breaking down completely. Ines keeps moving through them, but something in her resists closure. She tries harder than she should to make up for what she thinks she failed to give her father while he was still here. Even when it means going beyond what she has, beyond what her family can carry, she pushes anyway, as if effort alone could still reach him. After the burial, silence feels heavier than before. Her brother, Justin, pushes back against how she tries to hold things together, choices their father would not have approved of. In that long quiet after everything has been said, Ines is left with what refuses to leave her, the sense that nothing is ever truly finished, only carried differently.