CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

AVA’s POV

The official report called it an accident.

Weather conditions. Visibility impaired by the storm. A tragic and isolated incident on a known high-risk stretch of the coastal bridge.

I read that report four times in the first week. Then ten more times across the following month. Each time, it sat incorrectly with me, like a sentence in a book where one word has been altered and the meaning changed just enough to feel wrong without being immediately obvious.

Nobody else seemed to notice. Or perhaps they noticed and decided not to look too closely.

The city grieved briefly, the way cities grieved people they had never actually known. Serena Vale’s name faded from headlines within a fortnight and life continued its indifferent forward motion.

But I couldn’t move forward. I kept returning to the details that didn’t fit.

Serena was a careful driver. Cautious to the point where I teased her about it constantly, calling her a grandmother behind the wheel because she checked her mirrors too many times and never once exceeded the speed limit even on empty roads. The idea of her simply losing control in a rainstorm didn’t fit the person I had known for fifteen years.

Then there was the timing. She had sat in my apartment that evening sharing the weight of what she had overheard at that hotel. And within minutes of leaving my building, her car had gone off a bridge. I thought about that timing every single day for months.

I started asking questions, quietly at first. I spoke to people who knew the coastal road, to witnesses who had been near the bridge that evening, to a retired traffic officer who had worked that stretch for eleven years and he told me, almost as an aside, that several cameras along that route had experienced a simultaneous technical failure the night of the crash.

Simultaneous technical failure. On the exact stretch of road where Serena’s car went over the bridge.

I wrote all my findings down in a notebook I kept locked in my bedside drawer.

Names, dates, inconsistencies, questions without answers. The notebook grew thicker over those months while my sleep grew thinner and my appetite disappeared.

Then I found the driver. Though I couldn’t get his name. But I got a thread…small, fragile, and almost-nothing, but that connected a black SUV to a shell company and a shell company to a private financial account that had processed a single significant payment forty-eight hours before the accident.

I didn’t know what the payment meant yet. I didn’t know who owned the account or who authorized it. But it existed, and its existence told me that whatever happened on that bridge had been arranged by someone with enough money and enough motive to pay for it.

I was three days away from tracing the account when everything stopped.

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It didn’t happen dramatically and that was the part that still disturbed me up till date.

Nobody threatened me directly, nobody told me to stop, no menacing voice on the phone at midnight.

Instead, my landlord called to say my lease was being terminated early due to building renovations. My employer called to say my contract was being restructured and my position eliminated.

Within a week, the framework of my life in this city had been methodically dismantled by invisible hands.

And then an opportunity arrived. A job offer from a firm in another country, generous salary, immediate start date, everything arranged and waiting. It felt like a lifeline and I was exhausted, frightened and grief-hollowed enough to take it.

I left a week later, telling myself it was temporary. Telling myself I would come back and finish what I had started.

It took me almost four years to understand that leaving hadn’t been my decision at all. Someone had built a door and pointed me toward it and I had walked through it myself, which was so much cleaner than being pushed

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I had been back in the city for eleven days now.

My new apartment was smaller than my old one, a short-term rental in a quieter part of the city, deliberately chosen away from the circles where people might recognize me before I was ready to be recognized.

I had come back with almost nothing. A suitcase, my laptop, the locked notebook that had traveled with me to another country and back like a wound I couldn’t stop pressing.

I sat at the small kitchen table on the eleventh morning with a cup of tea cooling in front of me and the notebook open to the last page I had written on four years ago.

The shell company name. The payment date. Three question marks in a row where the account owner’s name should have been.

Four years and the page still looked the same.

I pressed my fingers flat against it. Serena would have hated this. She would have sat across this table from me with her hands wrapped around her own cup and told me in that quiet steady voice of hers to eat something and sleep properly and stop punishing myself for something that wasn’t my fault.

She always did that. Absorbed everyone else’s pain and redirected it before it destroyed them, never once considering that someone should have been doing the same for her.

I had failed her at that.

All the years she spent inside that marriage, slowly becoming less of herself. I saw it happened and I argued with her and I was worried about her and I loved her fiercely and completely.

But I still couldn’t save her.

My throat tightened painfully. Ethan’s face came to me suddenly, his small serious face, Adrian’s sharp eyes and Serena’s softness somehow existing in the same expression.

The way he had fallen asleep against Serena’s shoulder that last evening while she sat in my sitting room, looking at her phone with that expression she wore when she was trying very hard to convince herself everything was fine. I hadn’t known it was the last time.

You never know it’s the last time until long after it’s over. That was the cruelest thing about loss. It didn’t announce itself, it just arrived quietly inside a moment you weren’t paying enough attention to and turned it into the last one.

I closed the notebook slowly.

Outside the kitchen window, the city moved through its ordinary morning. People with ordinary problems and ordinary days, completely unaware that somewhere inside their city a woman had been murdered and buried beneath an official report and a polished public statement while the people responsible continued their lives without consequence.

I picked up my phone.

The news from last night was still open on the screen.

Victor Hale. Circumstances surrounding death under investigation.

I had recognized the name the moment it appeared. It was the same name attached to the financial account I had been three days away from tracing when my life in this city was quietly taken apart around me.

Victor Hale was dead.

Which meant someone was still cleaning up, still removing threads. Still protecting whatever was buried beneath Serena’s accident with the same efficiency they had used four years ago.

Which also meant I was back in this city at exactly the right time. Or exactly the wrong time.

I set the phone down and looked at the notebook again.

“I’m still looking,” I said quietly to the empty room, like a warning to whoever was still out there, still protecting themselves, still believing that Serena Vale’s story ended on that bridge four years ago.

It didn’t.

Not yet.