BETWEEN STATIONS

The train didn’t care who I was.

That was its first mercy.

It arrived with a dull metallic sigh, doors sliding open like a mouth yawning mid-sentence, and accepted me without curiosity. No cameras. No whispers. No one asking for statements or explanations or truths I’d already emptied out of myself.

I stepped inside and let the doors close behind me.

For weeks, my world had been rooms: interrogation rooms, hospital rooms, Julian’s library, Blackwater’s breathing halls. Spaces that demanded something from me. My voice. My silence. My strength.

The train demanded nothing.

I chose a window seat it was instinctive, almost involuntary. I needed motion I could witness, proof that the world still moved forward even when my life felt like it had been suspended mid-fall.

The train lurched, then steadied, and Blackwater and everything that came with it began to slide away.

Not all at once but slowly.

Goodbye Julian…

First the station, then the dark tangle of trees slick with mist, then glimpses of iron railings and wet stone. The coastline appeared and disappeared like a memory I hadn’t decided whether to keep.

I pressed my forehead to the glass. The landscape unfolded slowly, patiently, as if it understood I wasn’t ready for speed yet.

Gray ocean bled into marshland. Tall grasses bowed under the weight of water, their reflections trembling in shallow pools. Skeletal trees reached upward, bare and unapologetic, like they had nothing left to lose.

I watched them pass and felt something inside me loosen.

I thought of chess again of the moment when you finally see the board clearly. When the panic stops, not because you’ve won, but because you understand. Checkmate isn’t dramatic or theatrics. It’s clarity. It’s the quiet acceptance that the game has already resolved itself.

Julian had reached that moment before I did. He had stepped into it. I had stepped onto a train. That difference haunted me.

The conductor’s voice crackled overhead, announcing stops that felt like placeholders rather than destinations. Names floated through the air and vanished before I could attach meaning to them.

I wrapped my coat tighter around myself.

For the first time since everything began, no one needed me to be useful.

Not Julian.

Not Claire.

Not the police but especially not the dead.

Just me, existing between where I’d been and where I was going.

And that scared me more than the chaos ever had.

The further we traveled, the more the landscape changed. Marshland gave way to small towns brick buildings clustered close together, porches sagging under the weight of ordinary lives. Then rivers, wide and indifferent, catching the light like sheets of metal.

I watched factories blur into graffiti, then into apartment blocks, then into nothing distinct at all.

Somewhere along the Hudson, the thought finally surfaced, fully formed:

Who am I when I’m not carrying someone else’s truth?

I’d been a ghostwriter long before I ever met Julian Vale.

I learned early how to vanish inside other people’s voices. How to polish pain until it became palatable. How to survive by being indispensable and unseen at the same time.

Words were safer when they weren’t mine.

But sitting there, watching the water stretch endlessly alongside the tracks, I felt the old version of myself stirring; the girl who loved history because it didn’t flinch from damage, who loved cinema because it admitted longing rarely resolved neatly, who loved musicals because sometimes talking wasn’t enough, singing only could give justice to the emotions felt.

Of course I’d fallen into a story like this. Of course I’d loved someone who finally chose truth over survival.

The skyline appeared gradually, rising out of the haze like a promise that didn’t care whether I was ready to keep it. Buildings stacked against the sky, unapologetic, vast.

New York didn’t wait.

The train slowed.

Then sighed.

Then stopped.

Penn Station swallowed me whole.

The moment I stepped onto the platform, sound hit first rolling suitcases, overlapping announcements, footsteps echoing off tiled ceilings. The air buzzed with urgency, every person moving with purpose or pretending to.

I lowered my head without thinking.

Hat.

Scarf.

Glasses I didn’t need.

I hadn’t planned to hide. But my body remembered how to disappear long before my mind caught up.

Every face felt like a risk.

I moved with the current, letting strangers dictate my speed, my direction. The anonymity should’ve felt like freedom. Instead, it felt fragile like a spell that could break if someone said my name too loudly.

Ava.

I flinched.

No one had spoken.

Just my mind, rehearsing threats.

At the top of the stairs marked Street Level, I hesitated. My hand tightened around the rail, pulse ticking too fast. For a moment, Blackwater Hall flickered behind my eyes; the gates, the fog, the way the world had waited there with sharpened teeth.

This city wouldn’t wait.

It would simply move on.

I stepped outside.

Cold air slapped my cheeks, sharp and alive. Taxis honked. Sirens wailed somewhere distant. Steam rose from grates like the city itself was breathing.

I blended in instantly.

That should have reassured me.

It didn’t.

I walked three blocks before I realized I was holding my breath.

Then-

“Hey. Excuse me.”

The voice was male. Close. Too close.

I kept walking.

“Sorry, one second?”

My spine locked.

Every instinct screamed don’t turn. New York etiquette agreed. Survival doubled down.

But my feet slowed anyway. When I finally looked back, it wasn’t a paparazzo.

No camera.

No microphone.

Just a man with a messenger bag and a phone in his hand. Ordinary. Almost apologetic.

“I’m really sorry,” he said quickly. “I don’t mean to be weird, but has anyone ever told you you look like-“

My stomach dropped.

“-that writer?” he finished. “The one in the news.”

There it was.

Fear doesn’t arrive loudly. It tightens. Narrows. Turns your body into a closed system.

“I get that a lot,” I said, voice even, borrowed. “Wrong person.”

He hesitated, squinting, uncertainty creeping in.

“No, I swear! Ava Alessi, right? The-”

I smiled too fast. Too polite.

“Sorry,” I said again. “You’re mistaken.”

Embarrassment flushed his face. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“It’s okay,” I said. And it was, in the way near-misses are okay.

I turned and walked away before he could apologize again. My heart didn’t slow for another block. I ducked into a coffee shop without thinking. Warmth. The smell of burnt espresso. Indie music humming low enough not to matter. I stood in line, hands shaking just slightly, watching condensation trace paths down the window like the city crying quietly for no reason at all.

This is what it costs, I thought.

Not prison.

But the constant awareness that your face belongs to a story you didn’t consent to.

When my coffee came, I didn’t sit. I wrapped my hands around the cup like it was an anchor and stepped back outside.

I walked.

Past storefronts and scaffolding. Past couples arguing softly and tourists craning their necks at buildings that didn’t care about them. The city absorbed me piece by piece ; my outline dissolving into crowds, my pulse syncing with crosswalk lights.

Eventually, my legs slowed on their own. I stopped at a corner and looked up. A strip of sky wedged between buildings.

Gray-blue. Narrow but real.

I breathed.

I wasn’t safe.

Not yet.

But I was here.

Not as a headline.

Not as Julian Vale’s ghostwriter.

Not as the girl from the interrogation room. Just a woman on a New York sidewalk, holding a cup of coffee, unnamed by the crowd.

And maybe just maybe that was how healing started. Not with answers. But with the courage to exist anyway.

Watching people move all at once, the soft collision of coats, the rhythm of footsteps, the quiet certainty with which the crowd advanced. I felt something settle inside me. Each person moved with purpose, adjusting, yielding, continuing. And suddenly, I realized I was someone again.

My identity who I thought I was, who I had allowed myself to become had been stitched entirely to this place, to Julian, to Blackwater Hall, as if I had mistaken confinement for design. But I had a life before all of this. It wasn’t grand or legendary; it wouldn’t make headlines or history books. It was small, imperfect, and undeniably mine.

And maybe that was the point. Not every victory needed witnesses. Not every ending required a final confrontation. Sometimes the game ended quietly when you stepped out of its boundaries and refused to wait for another move.

I joined the flow of people and kept walking. For the first time, I wasn’t reacting or anticipating. I wasn’t a piece on anyone else’s board. I was simply moving forward.

Happy to see to see you again New York.