Chapter 1

Her mother had worked extra shifts to afford them. The doctor had said Lina’s eyes needed correction, but the rose tint had been an accident—a mistake in the order that no one had the money to fix. “They’re just as good,” her mother had said, not meeting her eyes. “You’ll get used to them.” And so she had, slowly, day by day, until the pink world became her normal world.

Lina was eight years old when she first understood that seeing through rose-tinted glass was more than just a quirk of vision. It was a way of hiding, a soft filter she could pull over the sharp edges of life. The day she learned this, the sky was gray, and the house was quiet in a way that made her stomach clench. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, staring at a pile of bills, her face a mask of tired worry. Lina stood in the doorway, her glasses perched on her nose, watching as the numbers blurred into soft pink smudges. The worry in her mother’s eyes remained, but beneath the tint, it seemed distant—a problem in a story she was reading, not her own.

She did not speak. She slipped back into the hallway and pressed her palm against the wallpaper, feeling the raised pattern beneath her fingers. The world outside the window was ordinary: a neighbor’s dog barking, a car rattling past, the damp earth of the garden. But through her glasses, everything had a gentle air, as if the world itself had agreed to be kind. She decided then that the glasses were a secret, a little magic she could carry with her.

The first time she really needed that magic was at school. The other children noticed the pink lenses. They called her names, teased her for seeing everything in a “girly” color. Lina did not argue. She simply looked at them through the rose hue, softening their sharp words into something less painful. Their faces became flushed and innocent, their taunts quieter under the tint. She learned to smile and nod, to keep her eyes fixed on the playground trees, which looked as though they were always in blossom. The world was safer that way, even if it was not true.

At night, she took off the glasses and lay them on her nightstand. The bedroom returned to its dull, ordinary colors: the gray walls, the faded blue quilt, the yellow lamp that cast a harsh glare. She would stare at the ceiling and listen to her mother moving in the other room, and the weight of the real world would press on her chest like a stone. But then she would reach for the glasses, put them on one last time before sleep, and the room would soften. The crack in the ceiling became a pink river. The pile of books on the floor became a treasure. And she could breathe again.

There was a boy in her class named Tomas, who always sat at the back and drew airplanes in his notebook. He had a quiet way about him, and sometimes he would look at Lina with a curiosity that did not feel mean. One afternoon, during a fire drill, he stood next to her on the lawn as the world blurred with noise and movement. He leaned in and asked, “Do you really see everything pink?”

She wanted to say yes, that the grass was pink and the sky was pink and the fire trucks were a deep, dark rose. But instead she said, “Not everything. Just the edges.”

He nodded as if that made sense. “It must be nice,” he said. “To have a secret way to look at things.”

She had never thought of it that way before. The glasses were a secret, but they were also a wall. A wall between her and the sharpness of the world. She did not know if she was hiding or protecting herself, but she held onto them as if they were the last thread connecting her to something gentle.

Years passed. The glasses grew thin at the hinges, and her mother promised to buy new ones someday. But the same money worries lingered, the same quiet stress that filled their small apartment. Lina became a teenager, and the world grew more complex. The rose filter still helped, but she began to notice things she could not ignore: the way her mother’s shoulders slumped after a long shift, the tears in her own eyes when she looked at her reflection and saw a stranger staring back. The glasses could soften color, but they could not change the shape of things.

Late one autumn evening, as the leaves outside turned brown and fell, Lina sat in her room with her glasses in her lap. The lamp was off, and the only light came from the streetlight filtering through the curtains. She lifted the glasses to her eyes and looked at the room. Everything was pink—the same familiar pink she had known for years. But for the first time, she saw it as a lie. The pink was a decoration, a coat of paint over a house that was falling apart. She lowered the glasses and the room returned to its true grays and shadows. The loneliness of it hit her like a cold wind.

She put the glasses on again, quickly, and the pink returned. Her breath steadied. The room became tolerable. She realized then that she could not take them off for long. The real world was too harsh, too demanding. The pink was her crutch, her comfort, her armor.

That night, as she closed her eyes with the glasses still on her face, she made a silent promise to herself: one day, she would learn to see without them. One day, she would face the world in full color. But that day was not today. Today, she would sleep in the pink until the morning light broke through the curtains, reminding her that the world—untinted and unfiltered—was always waiting.

And somewhere deep inside, a small voice whispered that the real challenge was not wearing the glasses, but knowing when to take them off. She did not answer that voice. She only adjusted the frames on her nose and let the pink embrace her until dreams took her away.

The next morning, she woke to find a crack running through the left lens. A thin, spiderweb line from the edge to the center. She touched it with her fingertip, feeling the slight roughness. The world still looked pink, but now there was a permanent scar in her view. Something had changed. She did not know if it was a break or a beginning. But she knew, with a certainty that made her heart beat faster, that the pink world was starting to chip, and soon she would have to decide how to see what lay beneath.