Chapter 2

I went up to my room, the same room I had slept in since I was ten.

Everything was just as I had left it, but it felt different, alien.

The walls were covered in my early sketches, charcoal drawings of Julian' s hands, his profile as he worked, his sleeping face.

My sanctuary had become a museum of a love that was never real.

My eyes landed on a set of expensive sable brushes on my drafting table.

He had given them to me for my sixteenth birthday.

I remembered that day clearly.

He had found me crying in the studio, frustrated with a painting that wouldn' t cooperate.

He had wrapped his arms around me from behind, his chin resting on my head.

"Great art comes from great pain, little one," he had whispered, "but you don't need to feel it alone."

Then he presented the brushes, telling me they were for a future master.

I had clung to that memory, to the feeling of his arms around me, for years.

He had been my whole world.

I picked up one of the brushes, the wood smooth and cool against my skin.

The memory no longer brought comfort, only a dull ache.

A soft knock came at the door.

It was Julian.

He stood in the doorway, looking uncertain.

"Amelia, are you really okay?" he asked, his voice low and concerned.

"You're being... quiet."

"I'm fine, Julian. Just tired from the trip."

He took a step into the room.

"I know this is a lot to take in. I should have told you about Clara sooner, I just-"

"Julian, darling?" Clara' s voice, sweet and possessive, drifted up the stairs.

"Can you get me a glass of water? The baby is kicking so much."

Julian' s head snapped toward the sound.

The concern for me vanished from his face, replaced by an immediate, focused worry for her.

"Of course, my love. I'll be right there."

He gave me one last, fleeting look.

"We'll talk later."

He turned and left without another word.

I stood there, listening to his footsteps hurry down the stairs.

I heard him cooing at Clara, his voice dripping with the affection he once reserved for me.

I walked to my doorway and looked down.

He was kneeling in front of her on the sofa, his hand on her stomach again, his face glowing with a father' s joy.

They were a perfect portrait of a family, a complete world that had no space for me.

I felt a profound sense of dislocation.

I had grown up in this house, but it was no longer my home.

I was a ghost here, haunting the edges of someone else' s life.

Later that evening, at a dinner that was suffocatingly awkward, Julian made his announcement.

"Clara has some wonderful ideas for redecorating," he said, not looking at me.

"We were thinking your old playroom would make a perfect nursery. It gets the best morning light."

My playroom.

The room he had designed for me, with a whole wall as a chalkboard and swings hanging from the ceiling.

A room full of my childhood.

"You don't need it anymore, do you, Amelia?" he asked, a rhetorical question that was really a command.

I felt Clara's eyes on me, watching, waiting for me to crack.

I looked at Julian, at his handsome, oblivious face, and I felt nothing but a vast, cold emptiness.

The last tear I would ever shed for him was drying on the inside of my heart.

"No," I said, my voice clear and steady.

"I don't need it anymore. It's a wonderful idea."

That night, after they had gone to bed, I gathered every letter he had ever sent me at school, every birthday card, every little note he' d left on my pillow.

I took the charcoal sketches of him down from my walls.

I carried the box of memories into the damp, dark garden behind the house.

In a small, metal fire pit we used for burning leaves, I lit a match.

I watched the flames curl around the paper, turning his beautiful, looping handwriting into black ash.

The faces I had drawn with such love blistered and disappeared.

I didn't cry.

It was a funeral, a quiet and final goodbye to the girl I used to be.

The smoke rose into the night sky, and with it, I let him go.