CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

AVA’s POV

There are people in your life whose absence changes the actual texture of the world. Not just the emotional landscape of it. The literal, physical, and everyday texture. The way a room sounds different without them, or the way a joke lands flat because the one person who would have laughed at exactly the right moment isn’t there anymore. The way you reach for your phone to tell them something and your thumb is already opening the conversation before your brain remembered they’re no more.

Serena Vale was that person to me.

She had been my best friend since high school days when I was fourteen years old. She lent me her last twenty dollars for a bus fare because I lost my money and then pretended she had forgotten about it.

Serena was generous in ways she never announced, carrying people without making them feel carried.

I had loved her like a sister all through our friendship. And I sometimes wonder whether I loved her well enough when it mattered most.

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I still remember the last night I saw her just like yesterday.

I had opened the apartment door and taken one look at her face and pulled her inside before she could say a single word.

“Sit,” I said, steering her toward the couch. “I’ll make tea.”

“I don’t want tea, Ava.” She retorted.

“I know but I’m making it anyway.” I replied.

Ethan was on the carpet surrounded by his toys and the second he spotted her, his whole face transformed. He scrambled up and threw himself at her legs with the full-body enthusiasm only four-year-olds managed without embarrassment.

“Mommy!”

She caught him and held him, while she buried her face briefly in his hair, I turned toward the kitchen so she could have that moment without being watched.

When I came back with the tea, she had Ethan settled on her lap, one arm wrapped around him, and she was staring at nothing in particular. Her expression sober and devastating.

I set the cups down, sat beside her, and held her hands. “Tell me everything.”

And she did tell me all of it.

The anonymous messages, the hotel, Celeste discussing her divorce like she was some sort of thrash and Adrian’s choosing business over her, over their marriage.

I listened to every word in painful silence. I let her into my arm and let her sob it all out.

I suggested she stay over at my place that night but she refused, she insisted on confronting Adrian and I reasoned with her. Even if they were finally going to get a divorce. She should know on what basis that was going to hold.

Watching her cry broke my heart so much, it took a considerable personal restraint to stop me from calling Adrian and cursing him out right there for the emotional torture he made my friend go through.

I watched her drink the tea she hadn’t wanted, she held the cup with both hands, the way she always did when she needed something to grip onto.

After a long while she looked down at Ethan asleep against her shoulder and a soft but completely devastated expression moved across her face.

“I gave him everything I had,” she said quietly, another round fresh tears welled up her eyes.

“I know you did.”

“Seven years, Ava. I sold my mother’s jewelry to save his company.” She hiccuped as she tried to find the words . “I-I sat through a hundred dinners where Victoria made me feel like furniture and I smiled and stayed because I thought that was what love asked of you.” A short broken sound escaped her, halfway between laugh and scream. “And he was planning to replace me the whole time. With someone his family actually approved of. Someone he thinks now worthy to be by his side”

“He’s a fool,” I said flatly. “An emotionally blind, ungrateful, spectacular fool.”

She almost smiled.

“You’re not going to say I told you so?”

“Not tonight,” I said. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

That almost-smile stayed a moment longer before fading.

We sat in the quietness for a while, Ethan’s small steady breath between us, rain splattered against the windows. Eventually she stood, shifting Ethan carefully to her shoulder without waking him.

“I should go,” she said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here tonight.” I asked again worriedly.

“No, I can’t, if I stay here it becomes real.” She said quietly, almost to herself. “I just need to go home and think.”

I walked her to the door, held it open while she buckled Ethan into the car back seat.

“Call me the moment you get home,” I said.

She forced a smile, “I will.”

“Serena.”

She looked up from the car and I ran up to her.

“Whatever that marriage made you feel about yourself, that was never the truth about you. You hear me?”

She held my gaze for a second, quietly absorbing what I said. Then she nodded once.

“Drive carefully,” I said as she pulled away into the rain. I stood in the doorway until her tail lights disappeared around the corner.

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She didn’t call that night.

I told myself she was home, and probably exhausted. That she had fallen asleep with Ethan the way she sometimes did after difficult evenings.

I sent her a short message before bed, telling her I am always here whenever she needed to talk. And I went to bed.

My phone was the first thing I checked when I woke up the next morning. She hasn’t called either.

I called twice before noon and left a voicemail the second time, telling her I had made too much soup and she owed me a visit.

By afternoon I had called three more times and she’s still not reachable. I had started to get worried then.

That evening the news was on low in the background while I sat on the couch with my phone in my hand refreshing our unanswered conversation.Then I caught brief segments from the news.

Westbridge Coastal Road. A vehicle accident during the previous night’s storm. No body recovered.

The reporter moved to the next story in under a minute. I glanced at the screen and felt the distant sadness you feel for strangers but I did not connect it. I was just so much engrossed in the phone in my hand.

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Two days later Adrian Laurent’s face appeared on my television.

I had been at the kitchen table with cold coffee, still trying to decide whether to call Adrian directly, wondering if Serena had gone back to the house and just needed space from everyone including me. The television was noise in the background and I wasn’t watching properly.

Then I looked up and I saw Adrian’s image on the television, he stood before a row of cameras wearing a kind of exhausted face.

I held the coffee mug firmly and moved closer to the television.

The headline beneath his image arrived in my vision before my mind finished reading it.

LAURENT CEO ADDRESSES DEATH OF WIFE SERENA VALE IN BRIDGE ACCIDENT.

The coffee cup left my hand, I don’t remember letting it go. I only remembered the sound of it hitting the floor and Adrian’s voice reaching me from somewhere very far away.

“My wife did not deserve what happened to her.”

And then the brief news segment from two evenings ago assembled itself inside my head all at once.

The coastal bridge. A car in the ocean. No body recovered.

Serena hadn’t been answering my calls because Serena had been in that car.

I panicked toward my phone on the kitchen table. I grabbed it and dialed Serena’s number while praying silently in me for the news to be false.

But I kept getting redirected to the voicemail on each attempt.

I fell back on the floor, my entire existence shattered. I don’t know how long I stayed on the floor but it was long enough for the programme to change twice. Long enough for the afternoon light to shift slowly across the kitchen tiles. When I finally stood up, I felt a feeling far deeper than sorrow. I felt shattered and crumbled.

I walked back to the television and watched Adrian’s interview replay on the evening bulletin. I studied his face the way you study a document you suspected had been altered, looking for the specific place where the truth had been adjusted.

I searched frantically for guilt or relief but I found something worse…a man who looked genuinely destroyed, and whom I still could not bring myself to fully believe. Shattered men were still capable of unforgivable things.

And Serena had left my apartment that night, driven away into the rain, and never arrived home.

That was not an accident.

I knew it the way I knew my own name. I just had to prove it.