Chapter 6

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Chapter 6: silenced

Mornings used to mean something. A new start. Clean air, sunlight. A kind of quiet optimism.

Not this one.

This morning came like a ghost — pale, cold, and weightless. The storm was over, but the silence it left behind was worse. The kind of silence that made you hear your own thoughts too loud, too clearly.

I didn’t eat. Couldn’t. My stomach was tied up in knots so tight, even tea felt like too much.

I ended up in the greenhouse again. My hands were still dirty from pulling that diary out of the floor yesterday. It felt wrong to open it at first, like I was stealing something — someone else’s pain. But then I read the first page, and I couldn’t stop.

Aurelia.

I had expected secrets. What I hadn’t expected was how much of myself I would see in her. The same quiet aching. The same pretend smiles. She wrote like someone who was trying to claw her way out of a life she never asked for.

There were parts where the ink smudged from what looked like tears. Or maybe rain. Her handwriting tilted downward when she was afraid. She talked about Christopher like he was two people — one who held her hand, and one who held her hostage without meaning to. And then there was Ethan. His name showed up like a ghost — always on the edges, always wrapped in silence.

I flipped the pages too fast, needing to know, terrified of knowing.

Her last few entries were barely legible. As if she had been writing in the dark. As if she knew someone might find this, someday.

And then it hit me: maybe she wanted someone to.

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Christopher found me there. I didn’t even hear him walk in. I only looked up because the light shifted, and suddenly the room didn’t feel like mine anymore.

He stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets like he had no right to be there either.

“I knew you’d find it,” he said softly, like that made it okay.

I held the diary close, suddenly protective over it — over her.

“You lied to me.”

He didn’t argue.

“You let me believe she was just… gone. That it didn’t matter. That none of this mattered.”

He walked in slowly. Tired. Older than he looked yesterday. “Because I didn’t know how to explain it. What she became. What we all became after her.”

I shook my head. “She wasn’t insane, Christopher. She was terrified. Of this place. Of what it turned her into. Of Ethan.”

He froze at that name.

His jaw tensed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m starting to.”

He sat down across from me, rubbing his hands together like he was trying to warm himself. “You want the truth? Fine. Ethan and Aurelia had… history. She thought she could fix him. But he never wanted saving. He just wanted control.”

My stomach twisted. “You knew?”

“I knew too late.”

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That night, I didn’t sleep. I paced the halls like a ghost, passing the portraits of people who were never really who they pretended to be. I ended up outside Ethan’s study. I didn’t knock.

He opened the door anyway. Like he’d been expecting me.

His face didn’t change. “You found the diary.”

I held it up. “Why did you hate her?”

He leaned on the doorframe, cool as ever. “Because she got too close.”

“To what?”

“To everything that was supposed to stay buried.”

I stepped forward, angry now. “She was scared of you. You threatened her. You made her feel unsafe in her own home.”

He looked at me like I was a child playing with matches. “And yet she stayed.”

“Maybe she didn’t have a choice.”

He laughed. A quiet, humorless sound. “None of us did.”

I stared at him, heart pounding. “What are you so afraid I’ll find?”

He tilted his head. “The mirror breaks, Ivana. But it doesn’t just crack you. It cuts everyone around you too.”

He stepped back, leaving the door open behind him.

I stood there for a long time.

And I realized something no one had told me — maybe no one even wanted to admit:

Aurelia didn’t disappear.

She was erased.

And I was starting to see the fingerprints on the glass.