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CHAPTER 26
publish date:
2026-05-04 11:13:41
Latest chapter
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 29
Vivian’s POV I woke up at seven and lay in bed for a while before I did anything.The apartment was quiet. The city outside was doing its early morning thing — that low hum before the day fully starts. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the night before the way you think about something when you are not quite ready to face it directly. Around the edges of it. Not at the centre.Lyon’s face when he saw me.That stillness.I had imagined that moment in different versions over the past months. What it would look like. What it would feel like. Whether I would feel triumphant or sad or somewhere complicated between the two.I felt none of those things.What I felt was quieter than all of them. Like a page had turned in something. Not ended. Just turned. The story was still going but something had shifted in it and there was no going back to the version that existed before last night.I got up. Made tea. Stood at the window and looked at the city.My phone buzzed
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 28
Lyon’s POVJessica had put it in the calendar three weeks ago.The Waiting Room premiere. A film I knew nothing about . Jessica had read about it somewhere and decided it was worth attending. Good for visibility she said. The right kind of event. I had agreed without thinking much about it and then forgotten about it entirely until she reminded me the night before.I put on a suit and got in the car and went.That was the level of investment I had in that evening. A suit and a car and showing up because it was in the calendar and Jessica wanted to go and there was no reason not to. I had been to a hundred events like this. I would go to a hundred more. They all looked the same from the inside and required the same things from me and I had long since stopped expecting any of them to be anything other than what they were.The theatre was full when we arrived. Jessica moved through the entrance the way she always moved through rooms like this — like she had been here before, like she bel
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 27
Vivian’s POV At the premiere I had seen parts of the film before.Rough cuts mostly. Scenes in isolation on a small monitor in an editing suite with Sandra beside me making notes and Marcus standing at the back watching my face instead of the screen. I had seen Elena in pieces. I had never seen her whole.Watching her whole was one of the strangest things I have ever experienced.It is a specific kind of strange to watch yourself on a screen that size. Not vanity. Not self consciousness. I had gotten past both of those somewhere in the middle of the shoot when Marcus had pushed me so far past comfort that there was nothing left to protect. It was strange because the woman on that screen knew things I had spent a long time trying not to think about. She moved the way I moved when I thought nobody was watching. She held her breath the way I held mine when something was coming that I couldn’t stop. She looked at people the way I had learned to look at them in a house where looking car
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 26
Author’s POV Six months passed the way time passes when someone is too busy living to count it.Vivian Harrison moved out of the small room on fifty fourth street on a Thursday morning with three boxes and two bags and a landlord named Mr Ray who shook her hand at the door and said good luck in the simple way of a man who meant it. Daniel carried the boxes down. She carried the bags. They did it in four trips and didn’t make it into anything more than it was. When the last box was in the car she stood on the pavement for a moment and looked up at the window of the room that had held her when she had nothing and then she got in the car and they drove away.The new apartment was on the east side. Proper windows. A kitchen that was actually a kitchen. A wardrobe door that closed. She chose everything in it herself and paid for everything herself and the first night she slept there she woke up at three in the morning and lay in the dark and listened to the city outside a window that didn
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 25
Vivian’s POV I sat on the edge of that thin mattress for a long time after Sandra hung up. Lyon Stark is on the guest list. I said it out loud in the empty room just to hear how it sounded. It sounded strange. Not terrifying. Not devastating. Just strange in the way that certain things sound when you have spent so long not thinking about them that hearing them out loud feels like being handed something you forgot you put down. The last time I was in a room with Lyon Stark I had one bag and eleven dollars and nowhere to go. I had signed my name on a piece of paper and said okay and walked out of that house before sunrise because I couldn’t bear to wait for morning. That was less than a year ago. I lay back on the mattress and looked at the water stain on the ceiling. Four months. I had four months before I walked into a room and stood in it as someone completely different from the woman he had looked through and discarded. Four months to be ready for that. And I would be ready. I
DEAR EX, THE VERSION OF ME YOU LOST. CHAPTER 24
Vivian’s POV I sat up on the bed and held the phone with both hands.“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I never heard her name while I was in that house. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a connection. There were a lot of things happening in that house I wasn’t supposed to know about.”Sandra was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “That’s helpful.”“Sandra.” I pressed the phone harder against my ear. “What did you find?”“Nothing I can tell you yet,” she said. “I need to confirm a few more things before I say anything. If I’m wrong I don’t want to have put something in your head that wasn’t real.” A pause. “But I need you to do something for me.”“What?” I said.“Think back,” she said carefully. “To your time in the Stark house. Was there anyone connected to that family: staff, business associates, anyone at all — whose first name was Rhea?”I closed my eyes.Six years. A house full of people coming and going. Staff. Guests. Paul’s business associates sitting in the living room. K
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