Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Silent Departure
Her father's recovery was a slow, careful procession of quiet victories. The first solid meal. The first shuffling steps down the hospital corridor, leaning heavily on her mother. The first day home, installed in his favorite armchair like a king returned to a quieter, diminished throne. The doctors spoke of caution, of lifestyle changes, of stress avoidance. Every word was a tacit indictment of her.
Amaya became a ghost in her own home. She was the silent nurse who brought tea and pills, the diligent student who spread her psychology textbooks on the coffee table, the obedient fiancée who spoke in calm, measured tones with Richard on the phone each evening. The girl who had run in a torn wedding dress was buried under layers of duty and atonement.
The decision to leave was not discussed; it was presented. Her father, one evening as she adjusted his blanket, placed a frail hand over hers.
"The doctors say a quieter environment… away from the memories, the… the gossip," he said, not meeting her eyes. "Your mother's sister, in Oakhaven. She has a cottage. It's peaceful. Good air."
Oakhaven. A small, genteel city three hours away. A place with no history, no scandal, and no one who knew the name Snow.
"And my studies?" Amaya asked, her voice carefully neutral.
"The university there has an excellent psychology program. We've already made inquiries. Your admission is transferred. It's all arranged."
Of course it was. Arranged, like everything else. She was being relocated, a problem moved off the board to allow the main players to heal.
"When?" she asked.
"The day after tomorrow. It's best to… make a clean break."
A clean break. The words were a surgical instrument. It meant no goodbyes. No explanations. No lingering threads to pull at the neatly sutured wound of their reputation. It meant the Rowons would look out one morning and find the house empty, a For Sale sign staked in the lawn like a headstone.
The morning of the move dawned grey and drizzling, as if the sky itself was weeping for the goodbye that wouldn't happen. Amaya worked alongside the movers in a numb haze, packing the final boxes of her life into a van that would follow their car. Her room, her observatory, her sanctuary, was stripped bare. The windowsill where she had first watched Aris dissect a sunbeam was just a ledge of dusty wood.
She stood in the center of the empty room, her gaze drifting to the house next door. His window was dark. He was likely already at the hospital, in his world of tangible, fixable problems. She wondered, with a pain so sharp it was almost clean, if he would even notice they were gone. If days or weeks would pass before he looked over and saw the emptiness. What would he feel? Relief, probably. The removal of an irrational, distracting variable from his meticulously ordered environment.
Her mother called from downstairs, voice tight with the strain of efficiency. "Amaya! The car is waiting. Leave the key on the counter."
She took one last look. At the empty space where her bed had been. At the view she knew by heart. She didn't say goodbye to the walls. She simply turned and walked away.
The car ride was silent. Her father dozed in the passenger seat. Her mother's knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Amaya sat in the back, watching her neighborhood, her street, her whole world slide past the rain-streaked window like a film reel running backwards. They passed the coffee shop. They passed the university gates. They passed the turn that led to the carnival grounds.
And then they were on the highway, and the city that contained Aris Rowon became a smudge in the rearview mirror, and then nothing at all.
Oakhaven was all soft edges and muted colors. The cottage was charming, filled with her aunt's floral prints and the smell of lavender polish. Amaya's new room had a view of a tidy, anonymous garden. She unpacked her books, her clothes, the silver swan locket she buried at the bottom of a jewelry box. She set up her new desk. It was all perfectly adequate. It was a life in a neutral tone.
Her new university was efficient and friendly. She attended lectures, took notes, participated in discussions. She was a model student—focused, polite, slightly distant. She made no close friends. She offered no stories of her past. She was a blank page, and she intended to keep it that way.
Weeks bled into months. The seasons changed in Oakhaven. Her father grew stronger, his colour returning. Her mother joined a gardening club. Life achieved a kind of placid, uneventful rhythm. The engagement to Richard was a low-frequency hum in the background—weekly phone calls that were more like boardroom updates, plans for a distant, unspecified future.
Amaya thought she had succeeded. She had become what was required: quiet, dutiful, unremarkable. The ghost of the girl she had been was safely locked away in a city three hours behind her.
Until the day she saw the book.
It was in a small, second-hand bookshop near the university, a place she sometimes wandered to smell the old paper and feel a pang for her lost fantasies. She was browsing the fiction section, her fingers trailing over familiar spines, when a particular shade of dark blue caught her eye. She pulled it out.
The Atlas of Forgotten Kingdoms: Myths and Lands Beyond the Map.
The exact edition. The same silvery script. A faint, coffee-coloured ring stained the lower corner of the cover, a mark of use. Her heart gave a single, violent thud against her ribs, so loud she was sure the shopkeeper could hear it.
It wasn't her copy. Hers was on her new bookshelf, a sacred relic she could not bring herself to open. This was a stranger's copy. But it was the same. A direct pipeline to the moment in his kitchen, to his clinical voice justifying the gift, to the fleeting, unguarded warmth she had imagined in his eyes.
Her hands began to tremble. The careful numbness she had cultivated, the wall of ice around her heart, developed a hairline crack. A rush of memory flooded through—not just of him, but of herself. The girl who believed in grand gestures, who read faerie tales on rooftops, who argued about metanephridia with furious, loving intensity. That girl was not here, in this polite, pastel city. That girl was entombed back in that empty bedroom, in the wreckage of a wedding, in the cold rejection on a porch.
She had run from the scandal, from her family's disappointment, from Aris's dismissal. But she had also, she realized with a clarity that stole her breath, run from herself. And she had done it without a word, without a fight, without a goodbye.
She clutched the book to her chest, the crack in the ice widening into a chasm. The ghost wasn't locked away. It was here with her, screaming in the silence. And for the first time since she had gotten into that car in the rain, Amaya Snow didn't feel numb.
She felt utterly, devastatingly lost. And feeling anything, even this, was a terrifying kind of beginning.