REMINISCING

~AVA’S POV~

The lock still sticks.

I remember that clearly from how I used to curse it under my breath, juggling keys and groceries, already halfway into the apartment before the door was fully open. It takes the same amount of force now. Turn, hesitate, push with my shoulder, turn again.

The sound is louder than I expected.

I pause, listening.

Nothing answers.

The apartment opens onto the same narrow entryway, the same scuffed hardwood floor that never quite looks clean. The air is cool and faintly stale, like it’s been waiting rather than abandoned. Dust, old detergent, and the ghost of the lemon cleaner I used obsessively.

I step inside and close the door. That sound lands differently. Before, it meant privacy now it means separation.

I leave my bag by the door. Before I would’ve hung my coat immediately, straightened the shoes by the wall, reset the space after the city. Tonight, I don’t. I notice that I don’t. The noticing itself automatic and clinical.

Observation without judgment.

That’s the rule.

The living room light flickers when I turn it on. It always has. I remember standing under it months ago, deciding the delay wasn’t worth fixing yet. The same calculation plays out now, familiar and irrelevant.

The couch is still too close to the radiator. I never found a better configuration for the room. Back then, that annoyed me. Now, it feels like evidence, proof that some problems remain unsolved simply because life moves faster than intention.

On the coffee table: the ring from a mug I once set down without a coaster. That ring bothered me enough that I scrubbed at it until the finish dulled. I remember thinking I’d ruined the table. I remember thinking small damage felt catastrophic then.

Perspective is a cruel teacher.

I move through the apartment slowly, cataloguing rather than reminiscing. The leaning bookshelf. The dead plant by the window I kept meaning to replace. The framed photograph I never hung, still propped against the wall like it was waiting for a decision I never made. This is where I lived before chaos unleashed when Julian was still contained inside someone else’s screen. When consequences were theoretical and my distance from them felt professional rather than personal.

I opened the window the same inch I always did. Cold air pushes in immediately, bringing the city with it. Traffic, voices, the echo of a siren far enough away to be abstract. My side of New York didn’t changed for me. I sat on the couch and pull my coat tighter instead of taking it off. The fabric smells like airports and borrowed spaces. I note the choice, then let it stand. Not everything needs correction.

My phone vibrates in my hand. I don’t look. That, too, is a choice. I already know who it isn’t. Julian and I didn’t discuss boundaries. We didn’t need to. The moment the case crossed from investigation into inevitability, proximity became a liability. Anything said between us would have been reinterpreted, recontextualized, sharpened.

Silence was cleaner.

I allow myself exactly one thought of him; contained, deliberate. No spiraling. No hypothetical futures. No Affection acknowledged. I’ve learned how quickly emotion becomes evidence when you let it rot.

I stand and go to the kitchen. The overhead light hums faintly. The sink bears a thin scratch along the basin I don’t remember making but recognize as mine. I run water into a glass and drink it standing up, eyes on the other part of my apartment I didn’t dissected yet.

I’m halfway through the glass when I see it.

My old notebook.

Under the bed almost like it fell accidentally and I never bothered to look for it.

I knew the notebook before I could even touch it. My body ran to it even if it meant bumping my head and stretching my arms more than physiologically possible to get it.

There it is.

I’m on my knees my body aching but there it is, the story of my life in the palm of my hands.

Same cheap black cover. Same elastic band stretched loose like it gave up trying to hold anything together. It’s thicker than I remember, swollen with abandoned intentions. There’s a superstition in me small, childish, stubborn that says if I don’t open it, none of the versions of myself trapped inside can look back.

Eventually, I do.

The first page smells faintly metallic, like old ink and dry paper. The handwriting is mine, but younger. Sharper. Less careful about survival.

Working titles:

- crossed out

- rewritten

- crossed out again

Margins crowded with arrows and question marks. Whole paragraphs strangled by black lines. I used to think revision was discipline. Now it just looks like fear with better posture.

I flip faster.

Fragments. Observations. Voices that don’t belong to anyone famous.

A woman who leaves her city because staying feels like consenting to disappearance. A man who survives something unforgivable and calls it grace. A story about silence that thinks it’s mercy.

I stop.

Because there it is the book.

My book.

Not the one I wrote for other people. The one I wanted to write. The one that got quietly euthanized after a phone call, a risk assessment, a polite apology dressed up as professional concern. The one that made me learn how quickly truth gets labeled inconvenient when powerful people get in the way. 

Back then, I still believed stories could outrun power.

So adorable really.

I remember the night it ended. I remember closing the laptop and realizing something essential had gone quiet in me, like a piano string snapping without making a sound. That was the night I stopped writing under my own name and started disappearing into other people’s voices. Ghostwriting didn’t start as shame. It started as compromise. Then survival. Then habit. You tell yourself it’s temporary. You tell yourself it’s still writing. You tell yourself anonymity is freedom. Eventually, you stop asking whose life you’re living.

I opened the notebook again.

I flip somewhere in the middle, pages soft from being worried over too many times. The spine creaks faintly, like it’s complaining about being disturbed after years of negotiated silence. The handwriting shifts here. Still mine, but looser. Less performative. Written by someone who hadn’t yet learned how to sound professional about despair.

There’s a paragraph circled hard enough the pen almost tore through the paper.I don’t remember writing it. That should bother me more than it does.

“The most dangerous men aren’t the violent ones. They’re the ones who survive something unforgivable and convince the world it made them deep instead of culpable.”

My breath stalls.

I read it again. Slower this time. Not because I don’t understand it, because I do.

My fingers tighten on the edge of the page. I can picture myself writing this: sitting on this same couch, knees pulled to my chest, the city humming through the window like it always does. Back when my anger still had direction. Back when I believed clarity would protect me.

There’s more underneath. Smaller handwriting. An addition, maybe written later. Or earlier. Time blurs with these things.

“He won’t look like a villain. He’ll look like someone everyone feels sorry for. And that’s how he’ll get away with it.”

I close the notebook too fast.

The sound echoes in the room, sharp and wrong, like I’ve just slammed a door in my own face.

This is ridiculous. Coincidence dressed up as significance. 

Still.

My pulse hasn’t slowed.

I set the notebook down again, farther away this time, like distance might make the words behave themselves. My eyes flick to the window, to the faint reflection of the room layered over Brooklyn’s lights. For a second, it feels like the apartment is watching me back.

I tell myself something practical. Something grounded.

You didn’t write about Julian and especially not Levi. You didn’t know them yet.

They were still just a headline. Two ghosts inside a search box.

And yet-

The sentence sits between my ribs, heavy and inconvenient.

I think of the way people speak about men like them. The language of tragedy. Of talent. Of loss. The way accountability gets softened into inevitability. The way survival is mistaken for innocence.

Suddenly my phone vibrates.

This time, I look.

I expected another headline. Another friend pretending not to ask questions yet. I’m not prepared for the name on the screen.

Richard Marks.

My former publisher.

The one who taught me how to sound grateful while being underpaid. The one who used words like exposure and long game the way other people use currency. The one who crushed me and my book simultaneously and of course the one that helped me transition into ghostwriting when my own book became… inconvenient.

I let it ring out.

A moment later, a message replaces the silence.

“Ava, I know this is out of the blue. I’ve heard you were back in New York. Listen, there’s a lot of noise right now, and people are going to be looking for context. You’re uniquely positioned.”

Uniquely positioned I almost laugh.

My gaze drifts, uninvited, to the corner of the living room where I used to keep a spreadsheet taped to the wall. Rent. Utilities. Minimums. Red numbers circled so often the paper thinned. The memory arrives with physical weight.

Julian erased those numbers quietly. Rent paid before I asked. A balance cleared without discussion. Relief disguised as generosity. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I’d pay him back.

Now he’s gone.

The numbers are back.

Another message arrives.

“No pressure. But if you wanted to put something together I would be more than interested. It would be… well-compensated.”

Well-compensated.

The radiator clicks. The apartment answers with a hollow sound that reminds me how thin the walls are. How temporary everything is when you can’t afford permanence.

I look at the notebook again.

At the version of myself who wrote warnings. Who believed naming a thing was enough to survive it.

I don’t respond.

Not because I’m virtuous. Because I’m tired and because I know exactly how traps are built. They never look like coercion. They look like relief.

I place the phone beside the notebook this time, not on top of it. Two offers. Two debts. Two versions of survival staring at me from opposite sides of the table.

Outside, Brooklyn keeps moving. Somewhere, a bar laughs too loud. Somewhere else, someone is counting change before bed.

I sit there, coat still on, calculating without writing anything down.

Not yet.

Some choices aren’t made in a night.

They wait.