[ AVA’S POV ]That’s the truth I keep circling back to, even now, when the sheets are still damp and my body aches in places I didn’t know could ache. I keep thinking if I had known, if the universe had given me even one warning, I might have run. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe I would have walked straight into the fire with my eyes open. Because the moment I saw him, something in me shifted, dark and irreversible.It started on a Thursday that smelled like rain and old secrets.My mother’s funeral had been three weeks earlier. The house in the hills still felt like a mausoleum dressed up as a home, too many empty rooms, too many photographs of a woman who had smiled for the camera while keeping entire lives locked behind her teeth. I was twenty-four, alone in a place that no longer felt like mine, sorting through boxes of papers that made no sense. Bank statements. Old letters. A sealed envelope with my name written in her handwriting, the ink slightly smudged as if she had cried wh
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