Ava shot upright, a ragged gasp tearing from her throat like she’d just been yanked out of a nightmare and dumped into silence.
“Oh my god,” she choked, clutching her chest. Her heartbeat thundered beneath her palm, wild and uneven.
Her eyes darted to the ceiling—blindingly white. Smooth. Cold. Too perfect. She blinked fast, trying to ground herself, but everything around her looked untouched. Sterile.
Like life had been wiped clean while she was gone.
“What… where am I?” she whispered, voice hoarse.
The answer didn’t come from the room. Just the soft hum of city traffic behind the floor-to-ceiling windows. She turned toward them, eyes catching the hazy skyline, soaked in morning light like the world didn’t notice something had gone missing.
Her mouth felt dry. Too dry. Like cotton had been stuffed in her throat. She tried to swallow, but it scratched.
She threw the covers off. Silk sheets slipped to the floor.
“Okay,” she muttered, hands trembling. “Okay, breathe.”
She looked down at her wrist—then froze.
The watch was still there. But it was dead. No glow. No hum. No pulse beneath her skin. Just a blank face and a silence that felt louder than any alarm.
Her brows furrowed. “No… no, you were glowing. You were burning.”
She pressed her fingers against it, like maybe she could restart it. Nothing.
A hollow ache bloomed in her chest, not sharp—steady. A strange, quiet rhythm where the watch had once lived like a second heartbeat.
Ava swung her legs over the side of the bed, the silk sheets sliding off her like armor discarded. The floor was cold against her bare feet. Her hand moved to her ring finger without thinking. Empty. The engagement ring was gone. The space felt deafening.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, screen lighting up with missed calls and messages, the constant buzz of a life she didn’t feel connected to anymore. She didn’t reach for it.
Barefoot, Ava stepped into her kitchen, everything around her crisp and untouched. The marble counter. The glass vase of dying lilies. The open laptop blinking on standby. The air felt stale, too clean. Too quiet.
She walked past her reflection in the oven door, catching a glimpse of someone who looked like her but wasn’t. Not anymore. Her fingers hovered over her laptop, trembling.
She sat, opened it. The screen lit up. Blank document. Empty space. But her heart knew exactly what to write. She exhaled. Typed the first line.
‘I met a boy once. He ruined me. And saved me. And I left him behind… but I never forgot him.’
The words poured like truth waiting years to surface. Sentence after sentence, her soul unraveled through her fingers. She wrote what couldn’t be said. Not to Nathaniel. Not to friends.
Only to the page. Only for the one who still lived in her.
Each word Ava typed felt like an anchor, not a lifeline. They didn’t heal the ache, but they steadied it, carving a rhythm into the pain she couldn’t escape.
“I don’t even know what I’m writing anymore,” Ava whispered, fingers flying across the keyboard as the morning sun crept through the windows, warm and blinding. “But I have to finish this.”
Her knuckles ached. Her spine screamed. Still, she didn’t stop.
“I’m not rereading it,” she muttered, jaw clenched. “If I look back, I’ll doubt it. And I already lived it once.”
With a shaky exhale, she closed the laptop and leaned back into the chair, her chest still pounding—deep, steady. Not grief. Something older. Something buried so long it had learned how to beat without being noticed.
She stood, her body heavy, like memory had wrapped itself around her legs.
“I need to find it,” she said under her breath as she drifted into the living room. Her eyes swept past familiar spines—old novels, dusty poetry, crumpled notebooks. “Not you. Not you either…”
Her fingers brushed along the bookcase, slow and searching, until they landed on something rough.
“There,” she whispered. “I knew you were still here.”
Her hand stopped on a black spiral-bound sketchbook with a frayed corner. She pulled it free, cradling it like something fragile. “God, I haven’t touched this in years.”
She walked to the couch, lowering herself carefully, like even her body knew what was coming. The weight of it. The remembering.
“This is gonna hurt,” she said quietly, flipping open the cover. “But maybe it’s time.”
Ava opened the sketchbook to the first page. Empty. She turned the page. Another empty one. Then a pencil outline of an eye, unfinished, a smudged rose. A corner of a mouth.
The messy, half-finished lines of teenage thoughts and emotions that never got the chance to become anything real.
She turned more pages, each one heavier than the last, until they were mostly blank, save for a few doodles—fragments of a girl who was trying, but never quite reaching.
Her breath caught in her throat when she turned to the next page.
It wasn’t empty. It wasn’t a drawing she remembered doing.
It was him.
Her heart stuttered. She froze, her fingers trembling as she traced the lines of his face—sharp, detailed, the curve of his jaw, the way his hoodie clung to his frame. His expression was distant, eyes looking off to the side, as if lost in a moment he couldn’t grasp.
She stared at it—Jace, older, but unmistakably him.
Ava closed her eyes for a moment, her pulse racing. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew. She hadn’t drawn this. She hadn’t touched this book in over a year.
But somehow, this sketch—this image—felt like something that had been waiting for her. She hadn’t picked up a pencil to draw this. But the pencil strokes, the shading, the exact details of his features—they were hers.
The drawing wasn’t just familiar—it was real. And so was the feeling it left behind.
Her hand hovered over the page, trembling, as the truth slowly seeped in.
“This wasn’t here before,” she whispered to no one, her voice breaking in the stillness. “It can’t be…”