I rush to the bed and drop onto it, dragging the blanket over my face as if it can hide me. It should make everything disappear. But it doesn’t. Instead, my mind starts playing games with me. I hear the soft hum of my mother’s voice, the way she used to sing me to sleep.
The memory pulls me in, and I begin to hum Lavender’s Blue, just like she did, just to calm myself. The sound doesn’t soothe me. It matches my heartbeat instead, growing louder every second.
My body starts to shake. The pain from earlier slowly returns, spreading through me.Did I push myself too far?Running, walking… all of it. Maybe this is just my body catching up. Or maybe none of this is real.
“This is all a dream,” I whisper. “Just a dream inside some weird dream.”
I pinch my skin, dragging it between my fingertips until it stings.
“Just a dream,” I whisper again.
I swallow hard, forcing down the lump in my throat, and shove the blanket off me.
I stand, even though it feels like every nerve in my body is on fire. My teeth grind together, the pressure sharpening in myjaw, but I move anyway, step by step, walking back toward the window, toward the tree.
He is no longer there.
Night has fallen within a minute. It’s already dark. The sky feels heavy, like it’s dropped too low, pressing down on everything.
Still, I keep staring at the tree, waiting to see him again. As if I want him to be there.
And at the same time… hoping he’s not.
What is happening to me?
The house is silent. Part of me thinks it’s too silent. That silence won’t let me sleep. Dasha used to say that people who feel uncomfortable in silence are people who got used to noise, that they grew up in loud households. I find truth in her words, mostly because I grew up in a loud household. Not because my parents fought all the time, but because there was always movement. If my parents weren’t around, there were nannies, tutors, and Dasha.
My parents never allowed me to be alone for even a second, treated me like porcelain as if I might crack the moment no one was watching.
When I was younger, I thought they were overly protective because I was so loved. Now I see it was mostly because they were afraid that if anything happened to me, they’d lose what I was worth.
I still don’t know where that money went, and I never cared enough to ask. I was so thoroughly conditioned to trust that I believed everyone, even people who weren’t my blood. And all they did was use me, drain me until there was nothing left but something dry and hollow.
Back then, it didn’t bother me. Now, knowing what it looks like to be by myself, it bothers me more than it should. When I had everything, I lived inside a lie. Now, with everyone gone and the lies buried with them, the truth hurts so much I can barely survive it.
And even if they had survived the accident, they would have died the moment they heard I would never be able to play piano again. Maybe it’s selfish of me to think like this, to turn my whole past over in my head like I’m stuck inside it. But when I can’t think about the future, I dig into the past because it hurts less.
Looking back, I might have been naive, but I was happy. Now I’m stuck with this pain in my chest that hurts but won’t let me cry, won’t let me grieve all the deaths. Maybe I just don’t know how.
I stand, letting my bare feet touch the cold wooden floor. After the shower, my cinnamon hair curls into loose locks, and the secondhand white nightgown feels like paper against my skin. I take a step forward, moving to the closet and trying to find something more comfortable to sleep in. At some point, I think I would be more comfortable sleeping naked, but the uneasy feeling that my mother might be watching me from above, disapproving, pushes the thought away.
The dark brown wooden closet stands in front of me. I open the door and find a single wooden bar dividing it into two parts. On the left, I have folded black and white shirts and jeans onto the shelves. On the right, two more similar nightgowns hang, almost identical to the one I am wearing.
I sigh and hold myself against the wooden bar in the middle, still feeling weak from the day. The weight of my body makes the closet lift slowly, and as it does, something falls from above and hits me right in the middle of my head.
“Fuck,” I curse, lifting my hand to the spot that hurts. A hiss slips through my teeth as my brows pull together.
I look down and see a black leather notebook wrapped in a thin black cord. Crouching down, I lift it into my hands, already forgetting why I came to the closet in the first place. I unwrap the cord, and beneath it, two gold letters are stamped into the leather.
“L.R.,” I say out loud, then open the first page.
I close the diary. Her words leave a sour taste in my mouth. She wrote every thought, every bitter thought, and left it all behind in the hope that someone would read it.
Who are you? Why do you sound like me?
Seven
AURELIA
