Chapter 6 – Adrian's Inner Life
Adrian carried her letter in the inside pocket of his jacket, folded so carefully that the edges remained sharp. He told himself he was being ridiculous — it was just paper, ink from a stranger's hand. And yet, when he reached for it in the middle of a restless day, the weight of it grounded him in a way nothing else had for years.
He lived alone in a second-floor walk-up, the kind of apartment that always smelled faintly of dust and radiator heat. The walls were bare except for one framed sketch Lucia had given him — his sister's work, a charcoal drawing of trees leaning against a storm. He had nothing else on display. Too many reminders of the past made the air feel tight in his chest.
His nights were the hardest.
Darkness carried silence, and silence carried memory. He tried to fight it sometimes — music, television reruns, white noise — but when the world went quiet, the roar always returned.
The sound of engines climbing. The vibration of metal beneath his feet. Laughter, sharp and bright from the seat beside him. Then the silence. A silence so complete it still woke him from dreams, gasping.
He had been seventeen when the plane went down. Seventeen, and full of wild plans with his best friend, who had never made it back. Adrian had lived, carried forward by luck or accident, and the guilt had grown heavier with every year that followed.
Doctors called it trauma. He called it noise.
Some nights, the noise filled the apartment until he wanted to claw at the walls just to drown it out. Words tangled in his head, jagged fragments he scribbled into notebooks and then crossed out. He couldn't quiet the storm, only survive it.
But now, there was something else inside the noise.
Her letter.
He unfolded it again that night, the lamplight turning the ink a muted brown. Her handwriting was uneven, as though she'd been afraid of her own words. He traced the lines with his finger, careful not to smudge them further.
Invisible.
He whispered the word aloud, testing it. His own invisibility had been different, but just as consuming. He had learned to stay small so no one would ask questions. He had learned to carry silence so no one would hear the guilt.
And here was someone else — a stranger — putting that same word into ink.
He let the letter rest on his chest as he lay back on the couch. The noise didn't vanish. It never did. The shadows still pressed in, the roar still echoed in his bones. But the letter bent the edges of it, softened the sharpness, gave him something solid to hold on to.
Adrian closed his eyes, the paper rising and falling with his breath. For the first time in a long while, he let exhaustion pull him under without fighting it.
He dreamed, but this time, the dream wasn't only of fire and silence.
It was also of a slanted line of handwriting that said: I'm tired of being invisible.
And the faint, impossible comfort of knowing he wasn't alone in the dark.