Chapter 18:

THE STATEMENT

THE GHOSTWRITER

The library wasn’t quiet this time. It wasn’t haunted or warm or drenched in metaphors. It felt like a war room and Julian meant it to.

He had pulled the curtains open wide so the world outside could see nothing, but he could see everything. The table was cleared except for a legal pad, a fountain pen, and a stack of documents Claire presumably intended to burn the second he stopped breathing.

I stepped inside, Claire’s last “Ava, please hunny think about it!” ringing in my ears like a warning shot.

Julian didn’t turn.

He didn’t pace.

He didn’t fidget.

He stood still, hands behind his back, spine straight, the posture of someone preparing to testify, not confess.

“Close the door,” he said.

I did. The click felt like a seal tightening.

He finally looked at me. His eyes weren’t soft or shattered or storming. They were diamond-clear. Sharp. Chosen.

“This isn’t the memoir,” he said. “This isn’t a book anyone gets to interpret. What we write today is fact. My truth. No emotion unless it serves clarity. No style unless it serves precision.”

A tiny breath escaped me. “You sound like Claire.”

“No,” he said quietly. “Claire would burn this room before letting this happen.”

He pulled out the chair opposite his, but he didn’t gesture for me to sit. He watched me instead as if deciding whether I was steady enough for the task.

“You’re sure about this?” I asked.

“That’s a pointless question,” he replied. “Because yes. And because I asked you last, and you said yes.” His gaze softened just a fraction. “You still mean it right?”

My fingers tightened around the notebook. “Yes. I have me a soft smile.

He exhaled, and for the first time since meeting him, it wasn’t a sigh of exhaustion.

It was something closer to acceptance. Resolve.

Like a king in the final act of a Shakespeare tragedy, stepping forward because there’s no way back.

“Good,” he said. “Get your pen.”

I sat.

He remained standing, pacing behind his chair not in agitation, but in the way someone circles a stage before delivering a monologue that will destroy reputations and resurrect ghosts.

“Start with this,” he said. “Write: My name is Julian Vale you may know me for singing with my brother Levi. We used to call each other the Vale’s. Today I’m coming forward. I protected Levi Vale, knowing who he was and he was doing. I did nothing when I should have done something. I hid what should have been exposed.”

I wrote.

My hand didn’t shake, but it wanted to.

Julian watched me as I scribbled, expression unreadable.

When I finished the line, he stepped closer but not in the dramatic, breath-catching way he sometimes did. This was controlled. Almost clinical. Still, my pulse jumped like I was sitting in the front row of a musical waiting for the big note.

“And then,” he said, “write that I’m done hiding.”

I did.

He walked around to the opposite side of the table, finally sitting. His hands flattened over the wood like he was grounding himself in the present, not the past.

“There’s more,” he said. “There’s… a lot. But before we continue…”

He paused.

Not because he was afraid not because he was breaking. This pause was different.

It was a choice.

A pivot.

He looked directly at me.

“Ava,” he said, “I need you to stay objective. I need you to write exactly what I say, even if it makes you hate me.”

“I won’t hate you,” I said automatically.

He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t make promises your heart may not keep.”

That hit deeper than I expected.

Sharper.

More intimate, in a way more dangerous than any confession. Because he wasn’t talking about the police or Levi, the girls or Hanna. He was talking about us. About something unnamed between us that kept tugging at the edges of every conversation.

I straightened. “I’m not here to love or hate you. I’m here to write the truth.” He stared at me for a long, assessing moment. Then something very small relaxed in his face a subtle easing, like a lock clicking open.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s why I chose you. That’s why this is the last thing you’ll ghostwrite for anyone.”

He tapped the table once.

“Ready for the next line?”

“Ready.”

He inhaled.

Spoke clearly.

No trembling.

No theatrics.

No collapse.

“Write this,” he said.

“Levi Vale was not a mystery. He was a pattern. I knew it. I saw it. And every time someone tried to stop him, the world rewarded him instead.”

My pen flew across the page.

He continued.

“And write that I helped him. Write that the label helped me. Write that the PR team erased every inconvenient truth. Write that our entire world…”

He swallowed, jaw tightening.

“Was built on abuse, lies and manipulation. We all knew it. Everyone involved with us knew”

This was Julian confessing structure. System. Complicity. The machinery behind the monster. A completely new territory. He leaned in, elbows on the table, fingers locked.

“And then,” he said quietly, “write that it ends today.”

I wrote.

The weight of it pressed into the paper, into my bones.He watched me again and this time something unfamiliar flickered in his eyes.

Not desperation.

Not longing.

Not dependence.

Faith.

“You’re steady,” he murmured. “Most people shake around me. You don’t.”

“Well someone has to write straight lines while your world collapses” I looked at him with a small giggle.

He huffed out a small laugh, dry but genuine.

“You’re infuriating,” he said softly with his typical smirk, the one that knows how to make me melt.

“But you still need me right?” I looked at him waiting for his response.

“I do…. I really do more than you could ever know” His gaze held mine.

“And if I’d known then what I know now”

He stopped.

Not because he didn’t know how the sentence ended. But because now wasn’t the moment to say it. He pushed the pen back toward me.

“Write the next part.”

I nodded.

And together, we kept going.

Not collapsing.

Not repeating.

Not spiraling.

Constructing.

A truth so sharp it could cut through every lie left standing. And somehow, in the quiet grind of honesty the real kind, the hard kind something between us began to take shape not out of trauma, but out of mutual courage.

An intimacy built not from pain…

…but from purpose.

Julian’s voice grew steadier the more he spoke, like he’d discovered some hidden rhythm inside himself part confession, part autopsy.

His words weren’t poetic.

They were forensic.

“Write this,” he would say again and again.

“When Levi hurt someone, I learned the quickest way to make the damage vanish. I learned it because the adults around me taught it. You don’t report. You rewrite. You bury.”

I wrote, ink carving the air between us into something sharp and irreversible.

“And write,” he added, “that I didn’t start out cruel. But silence makes you cruel, eventually.”

He leaned back for the first time since we began, exhaling through his nose like the air in the room had turned too thick to swallow. I could practically hear Claire’s voice echoing in his head, screaming NOT. ONE. WORD.

But he kept going.

“Write that the first time I lied for him, his victim was fourteen.”

The pen stilled in my hand.

Fourteen.

Julian watched me catch the weight of that number.

“Keep writing,” he said softly.

So I did.

He stood again too restless, too haunted to stay seated. He paced once, twice, then stopped behind my chair. I could feel the static of him, like some old Hollywood leading man revealing the dark secret mid-film, stepping into his own villain origin without excuses.

“And now the names…” he murmured. “All of them.”

I froze.

He moved beside me, voice low eerie, almost reverent.

“No one protected them,” he said. “The girls he hurt. The people he destroyed. And I’m done being the last shield between Levi and the consequences he earned.”

His hand brushed the table accidentally, I think but the tremor that sparked up my spine felt anything but accidental.

Not romantic.

But unmistakably charged.

“We will need a full list,” he ordered.

We started with the name he remembered from the attic polaroids.

With each city and each date.

It felt like carving a map of hell.

When the last name left his mouth, Julian pressed his palms against the table and bowed his head as if bracing for an impact only he could see. The library shifted around us quiet but alive, like the walls were inhaling the truth.

He looked at the pages.

Not with fear. With horror at himself. And then his voice dropped to something so soft it barely existed.

“Write this next part exactly.”

I nodded.

His eyes met mine; direct, unshielded.

Like the moment in a musical when the orchestra cuts out and suddenly it’s just one voice, trembling but sure, cutting straight to the bone.

“I loved my brother,” he said.

“But love isn’t a defense. It’s the reason I stayed silent.”

I swallowed hard.

“And,” he added, “write that I regret every second of that silence. Every one.”

I wrote until my hand cramped.

Then the room changed. It was subtle the kind of shift you feel before you hear thunder.

Julian sank slowly into the chair beside mine, not across the table this time. His shoulder brushed the edge of my arm, and I swear the temperature of the whole library tilted.

“You’re shaking,” he said quietly.

“I’m writing the truth about the Vale brothers,” I whispered back. “I’d be worried if I wasn’t.”

He almost smiled. Almost.

But something darker knotted in his brow.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He tilted his head, studying me like I was the confession now, not the pages.

“Do you understand what happens after this?” he asked softly.

“Yes.” Of course I knew.

“No.” His voice dipped lower. “Not the PR fallout. Not the police. I mean between us.”

My heart didn’t know whether to drop or freeze.

“What do you mean?”

He tapped the notebook one slow, deliberate tap.

“When this is done,” he said, “you walk away. That was part of the deal.”

“I remember.”

“Do you?”

His voice turned raw. “Because you’re writing like someone who plans to stay.”

The air tightened.

“Julian…” I breathed.

He leaned in not touching, but close enough that the shadows of our faces blended on the table’s polished wood.

“I need you to hear me,” he said. “Really hear me. When you walk out of this house, you take your life back. You survive. You heal. And I…”

He swallowed.

His lashes flickered like something was burning behind them.

“I don’t get to have you after this.”

Silence slammed between us. I wasn’t looking in his eyes and he wasn’t looking at mine, we were looking at each other souls. The time slowed and in the chaos somehow something warm, our breath’s intertwining, our lips almost touching.

Julian you don’t know how much I wish I could kiss you again…

Then he pushed back sharply, standing as if the nearness had scorched him.

“Let’s continue,” he said, voice uneven.

“No.” My voice cracked.

I rose too, the notebook pressed against my chest. “Julian, stop. Tell me what you’re really afraid of.”

He laughed a quiet, disbelieving sound.

“You know exactly what I’m afraid of.”

“Say it then!” My whole body was shaking waiting longing for something anything remotely looking like closure.

He looked at me really looked and something in him broke open, clean and bright.

“I’m afraid,” he whispered, “that the first real thing in my life is something I’m not allowed to keep… That I’m gonna lose you like all the people I ever loved.”

The words hit me like a blow.

I didn’t move. Neither did he.

Just two people standing in the eye of a storm they didn’t make but could feel closing in.

“Julian…” I started, but he shook his head.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “If you try to comfort me, I’ll lose the nerve to finish this.”

He returned to the table, knuckles white.

“Sit,” he ordered gently. “We’re almost done.”

I sat but my heartbeat wasn’t listening. It was roaring like a Broadway overture before the curtain rises something grand, inevitable, terrifying.

Julian exhaled slowly.

“Write the final section,” he said.

“I am confessing this willingly, without coercion. I take full responsibility for every action I took to protect my brother. I am done running from the truth. Let whatever comes next… come.”

I finished the sentence.

Julian watched me put the period at the end, watched like that tiny dot contained the whole of his fate.

Then silence.

Thick.

Grave-like.

The kind that makes your skin prickle.

He reached for the pages and for a moment, his fingers brushed mine.

Warm.

Unsteady.

He didn’t pull away.

Neither did I.

“Thank you,” he said, but the words cracked in the middle. “For doing this. For not looking away.”