CHAPTER 14: Stormy Canvas.
The sky outside was restless—grey clouds swirled like a pot of paint left too long unstirred. Rain tapped at the windows of the art room, soft and unrelenting.
Ava stood alone before a blank canvas.
Brush in hand.
Heart in fragments.
She hadn't planned to paint. Not today. Not after last night—after the way Eli's voice cracked when he spoke of the fire. After the way his hands trembled like ash being carried on wind.
But something inside her needed to come out.
She dipped her brush into deep midnight blue, then black, then streaks of scarlet—and without thinking, she let her hand move.
Sweeps. Slashes. Spirals.
It wasn't a painting.
It was a storm.
One she didn't know she'd been carrying.
With each brushstroke, the image took form: a hallway. Dark, suffocating. Flames twisted along the edges. A figure stood in the middle—small, young, frozen.
And behind them... another figure, blurred, distant, nearly swallowed by smoke.
Ava's breath caught.
Why did it feel so familiar?
She stepped back, heart pounding. The child in the painting—was that Eli?
Or was it... her?
The colors bled together on the canvas like memories that refused to stay buried. Her vision swam.
She dropped the brush.
Suddenly, her legs buckled, and she sank to the ground, head in her hands.
The room spun.
"Ava."
She didn't look up.
"Ava, are you okay?" It was Jasmine, one of the therapy center's staff. She approached slowly, eyes widening at the painting.
"I didn't mean to—I just started painting and—and it came out," Ava choked, her voice trembling. "Why does it look like this? Why does it feel like this?"
Jasmine knelt beside her, eyes scanning the stormy image. "Sometimes the truth leaks out through art before we're ready to speak it."
"But I don't remember this," Ava whispered. "I don't remember fire. I don't remember screaming or smoke or—" Her words caught in her throat like flames rising.
Jasmine looked at her gently. "Memory isn't always clear. But the body remembers. The heart remembers."
Ava shut her eyes.
Suddenly, flashes sparked behind her lids.
Orange.
Heat.
Running feet.
Glass shattering.
A boy screaming.
Her.
Turning away.
Her hand on a door handle.
Running.
Abandoning.
"No—no," she gasped, her fingers digging into the floor. "That wasn't me. That can't be me."
But it was there—inside her. In her muscles, in her breath, in the way she flinched at firelight. She hadn't just painted a nightmare.
She'd painted the beginning of a memory.
And it terrified her.