THE NEXT CHAPTER

~Ava’s POV~

Two years later, people called it my debut.

Some mornings, I hardly recognized the woman staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. Not in a dramatic way, everything was in a in the quiet details. My hair was longer now, brushing my shoulders in soft waves. I dyed it a warm copper, the color I always admired on strangers but never dared to try on myself. I wore mascara most days with a ted lip. Shirts that fit. Clothes chosen on purpose, instead of whatever was at my disposition.

My new apartment helped me loving change. I moved out of the dim shoebox I once called home, the place where the light came in weak and apologetic, where my walls held more shame than decoration. Now I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up overlooking a small leafy square, the kind of view reserved for people who believed they deserved nice things.

I still wasn’t used to it.

Sunlight spilled over the hardwood floors each morning like a blessing, gold and warm and persistent. I bought plants. Real ones. I watered them, tended to them, whispered to them on bad days like they were roommates. I even kept them alive, which made me feel like someone capable of nurturing something beyond her own survival.

Life no longer happened at me.

It happened with me.

And most surprising of all I had friends. Actual, living, stubborn people who refused to let me fold back into myself. Gigi with her chaotic curls and loud laugh; Cassie with her gentle voice and habit of hugging me at random moments as if reassurance were a language. They dragged me outside, forced new books into my hands, they showed me loved and tenderness I never expected for myself.

They made me feel less like a ghost.

And then there was my book.

Paper Bodies.

Even two years later, the title still looked unreal on the embossed hardcover, as if someone else had written it and I was just borrowing the accomplishment. Yet every sentence inside came from me; my pain, my truth, my breath shaken loose and set on the page.

The chapter that cost me the most to write was not about Julian.

Not about the Vales. Not even the attic. It was the chapter about him.

The doctor.

The man whose hands left bruises I spent half a decade pretending weren’t there.

Writing it felt like tearing my ribs open. But when I finished, when I let that truth exist on paper, something inside me shifted painfully, like bones realigning, then solidifying.

Women reached out to me from everywhere. Every corner of the country. Every kind of background. Their messages lived on my walls now, taped like tiny prayers:

“You told my story better than I ever could.”

“I thought no one would believe me.”

“Your courage made me believe I could be brave too.”

Some were angry. Some were exhausted. Some were survivors. Some were still fighting. All of them made the scars on my body feel a little less lonely. The book didn’t just change me.

It changed everything.

Including how I handled Richard Marks.

He reappeared like a mosquito after a summer rain; persistent, irritating, acting like he’d never ghosted me years earlier. Suddenly he wanted me on his publishing roster again. He sent emails dripping with faux warmth and faux praise:

“Ava, you were always destined for this level of exposure.”

“This book has the potential to be huge.”

“We’re prepared to invest heavily in your voice.”

He said “your voice” like it was something he’d helped carve, not something he’d once told me was too emotional, too unmarketable.

I declined.

Not politely.

Not gently.

I blocked him.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t apologize for closing a door. It felt like standing my ground for the girl I had been the one he dismissed, erased, minimized. The girl whose grief he called “too risky to publish.” The girl who still flinched when she remembered that call.

Let him look for new ghosts to exploit. I wasn’t one anymore.

Yet even with the new light in my life with sunlight and plants and friends and readings. I still kept one foot in a different world.

Julian’s.

Every Sunday at three in the afternoon, I sat at my wooden desk and wrote him a letter.

The habit began long before I realized it had become a ritual. His first letter and I still remembered how my breath caught when I saw the return address had arrived three weeks after the verdict. I opened it with trembling hands, expecting excuses or dramatics or some half-poetic attempt at earning sympathy.

Instead, it was shockingly simple. But I still wrote back. Then he wrote again.

And again.

And somehow, a thread formed between us not the romantic thread of a doomed story, not the toxic bond of a past tragedy, but something quieter, more fragile.

Something human. He never tried to make me his savior. Never pretended prison was purgatory or poetry. He didn’t elevate himself above guilt or sink beneath it.

He lived in it.

His letters were part confession, part therapy, part self-excavation. He wrote about the men he met inside. About the music program he joined. About detoxing, about nightmares, about the terrifying quiet when the lights went out.

He told me he taped newspaper photos of the ocean to his wall so he wouldn’t forget the color.

“I’m trying,” he wrote once. “For the first time in my life, I’m actually trying to be better than the man the world thinks I am.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I wrote about my plants. He told me that my rosemary survived longer than any hope he’d ever had. I told him hope wasn’t as delicate as he believed. He told me I sounded like someone who’d finally tasted freedom.

Maybe he was right.

There was no romance in our letters nothing scandalous or forbidden. Just two people unlearning the worst parts of themselves in parallel lines that occasionally touched.

And yet… he was present.

Not as the man who haunted Blackwater Hall. Not as the headlines. Not as the tragedy. But as Julian.

A flawed man that was trying to rebuilt himself. A man whose handwriting told me when he’d had a hard week.  Sometimes, when the afternoon light slanted across my desk a certain way, I wondered what it would feel like to see him again. Whether I’d stand tall or crumble. Whether he’d look the same. Whether I would.

He already did two years. 

With good behavior it was all a matter of time before he could be released. 

It didn’t scare me.

It didn’t thrill me.

It just was.

An inevitable orbit.

The past doesn’t vanish just because you’ve outgrown it.

It changes shape. It becomes manageable. It becomes something you can place on a shelf without shaking.

On the day I finished reading his most recent letter, the city outside my window was loud. Cars honking, pigeons fluttering, children screaming happily in the square below. I let the sounds drift in. I didn’t close the window.

Noise meant life.

I tucked Julian’s letter back under the twine-bound stack in my desk drawer, the drawer that held my history and my healing in equal measure.

Then I looked around at everything my life had become:

Friends. Plants. Light.

A published memoir. A nearly finished novel. A body I no longer despised. A voice I no longer hid. A past I no longer fled from. I wasn’t luminous because of Julian. I wasn’t luminous despite him either. I was luminous because I survived myself. I sat at my desk, pulled out a new sheet of paper, smoothed it with my palms, and began to write him a reply nothing dramatic, nothing heavy. Just truth.

I told him he’d be proud of my rosemary. I told him I bought a new lamp. I told him I laughed so hard last week that I snorted in public. I told him I was no longer afraid of the dark.

I told him I was writing again. A world built from my imagination instead of my wounds.

My voice, at last, belonging to me.

I finished the letter, sealed it, set it aside. Then I opened my laptop and began typing the first line of my next novel.

For the first time, the world didn’t feel like something happening to me.

It felt like something I was shaping; word by word, breath by breath, with a pen that finally pointed forward.

And I wasn’t done yet.