All Chapters of A THOUSAND REASONS To LEAVE : Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

CHAPTER One.Elena — First Person “There nights you remember not because something beautiful happened but because something inside you shifted,quietly, without permission and nothing was ever quite the same again.” “That night was one of them.” I didn't want to be at the Whitmore Gala. I never wanted to be at a place full of polished and fake smiles with rehearsed conversations,where everyone said exactly nothing while pretending to say everything. But my mum had pressed my dress into my hands with that look she always gave me,“the one sitting between please come with me”“and you must come with me”,and I have learned long ago that some battles weren't worth fighting especially when it comes to my mum.So I went. The Whitmore Grand hall was everything money could buy and taste could arrange.Crystal chandelier dripped light across the ceiling like frozen rain. Women in expensive dresses and diamond jewellery sets floated b

Chapter 3Elena — First PersonI have always been a good liar.It is a skill built over years of Sunday morning at the Hart family table, where the unspoken rules were as fixed as the seating arrangement: My Dad at the head of the table,my mum to his left, my younger brother Daniel across from me. We were a family who communicated in subtext. In carefully placed silences. In the things we did not say because saying them will require us to examine them,simply my fathers rule. So after returning from the Whitmor Gala, which took almost 2 hours ride I was so tried,my mum gave me a look from her book,the one that meant she had been waiting, not for me exactly, but for what I had to say about the Gala.I smiled,And said it was fine that was what she wanted to hear.I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for four hours trying to cozy myself to sleep.The morning came anyway,as morning do regardless of whether you have slept, I came downstairs to find both my

CHAPTER FIVEElena — First PersonI stared at those four words for a very long time.“Are you alright Elena?”Four words,my name at the end of them like an inspection .Like he had written it deliberately to make sure I understood he was not asking a general question, he was asking about me. The particular specific me who was currently pressed against a wall at the top of a staircase listening to her father arrange cameras on her own life. I should not have found it comforting.I didn't reply immediately.Instead I went to my room ,I closed the door with the quietness of someone who doesn't want to announce that they are closing a door. I sat on the edge of my bed and I placed my phone facedown on the mattress beside me and told myself with so much firmness ,that I was not going to respond to that message.Had he been thinking about me I asked myself.My head was so messed up,which made me so restless.In the hours I was restless, I showered, dressed,made my bed with the kind of ag

CHAPTER SEVENAdrian — Third PersonThe video had reached his father before Adrian had finished his first coffee of the morning. He had known it would, from the moment he walked away from that window at the Whitmore Gala. He knew that someone in that room would have noted and filled it and sent it upward through the invisible channel of informants his father had spent decades cultivating. He had known that they will be consequences for the version of himself after the conversation between him and his families rivals daughter. That version of himself was now sitting across a office desk from his father at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning,watching his father starring at him the way a chess player watches a board he has already won.The video was on the desk between them. His father had not played it, he didn’t need to,he already processed and constructed the architecture of the conversation on his head before Adrian had arrived. The video was