Chapter 21
CHAPTER 22 — The Attic Box
Two weeks later, Julia decided it was time to reclaim the final corners of her life.
She pulled the attic stairs down and climbed into the dusty, warm space under the roof. In the far corner, pushed behind holiday decorations, was a taped-up cardboard box.
It held the last remnants of her previous life. Old legal documents, faded photographs of a man whose name she no longer spoke, and the bitter correspondence from the years the divorce had raged like a wildfire.
She hadn't opened it in a decade. She had kept it out of some misplaced sense of record-keeping, a subconscious belief that she needed to hold onto the evidence of her pain to validate it.
Julia dragged the box downstairs to the living room.
She sat on the rug and opened the flaps.
She picked up a photograph of her ex-husband. She looked at his eyes, remembering the terror they used to instill in her.
She waited for the familiar spike of anxiety. She waited for her heart to race.
Nothing happened.
He was just a stranger in an old photograph. A ghost who had entirely lost his power to haunt.
Julia didn't cry. She didn't rage.
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She simply carried the box to the backyard, placed the contents into the metal fire pit, and struck a match. She watched the paper curl, turn black, and dissolve into ash.
The smoke drifted up into the clear blue sky, carrying away the very last invisible chains of her past.
