CHAPTER THIRTY
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Mia
Autumn had set in—leaves turning gold on the poplars, evenings cooler, the sea sharper and greyer under low cloud. Mia kept running. Kept helping. Kept breathing.
She started volunteering at the Amberley library—two mornings a week, sorting returns, shelving books, running the children’s story hour on Tuesdays.
The children were small, loud, trusting.
They climbed into her lap during The Very Hungry Caterpillar, asked her to read it again, laughed when she made silly voices for the caterpillar eating through the pages.
For an hour at a time, she could forget the paddock, the headlines, him.
Their small hands in hers, their easy trust—it was a kind of medicine she hadn’t known she needed.
She began writing again—not press releases, but stories.
Short ones. Fragments. A girl who left home and came back hollow.
A boy who chased speed until it chased him back.
She wrote in a notebook she kept hidden under her mattress, like a secret she wasn’t ready to share.
The words came slowly at first—halting, painful—then steadier.
She didn’t show anyone. Not yet. But putting them on the page felt like taking back a piece of herself she’d lost.
Her parents watched her—quietly, patiently. They saw the way she still flinched at notifications, the way she left the room when racing came on TV, the way she sometimes stared at the horizon like she was waiting for something that would never arrive.
One evening in May—autumn deepening, air crisp—her mother sat beside her on the veranda swing. The sky was bruised purple, stars just starting to prick through.
“You don’t have to tell us,” her mum said softly, rocking gently. “But when you’re ready… we’re here.”
Mia stared at the darkening paddocks, the silhouette of the hills against the sky.
She thought of Oxford—waking up bruised and disoriented, the whispers, the isolation.
Vegas—the flash of Marco’s camera, the punch, the headlines that erased her again.
Lucas’s voice breaking under the floodlights: “I love you.”
The words were gathering—slow, heavy, inevitable.
“I know,” she whispered.
She didn’t tell them yet.
But that night, after her parents had gone to bed, she pulled the notebook from under the mattress and wrote the first full page she’d managed in months. Not a fragment. A beginning.
She wrote about a girl who ran away from a story that wasn’t hers, and came home to write her own.
When she finished, she closed the notebook, set it on the dresser instead of hiding it, and turned off the lamp.
The room was dark. The house was quiet.
For the first time in a long time, she slept without dreaming of floodlights or headlines.
She wasn’t healed. Not yet.
But she was starting.