Chapter 34 - CH 34 - Amelia's Ascent

The silence that descended after the final, shattered phone call was not an emptiness to be filled; it was a crucible, a forge where something new and unbreakable was being tempered. In the days and weeks that followed the cataclysmic break, Amelia did not wallow. She did not spend hours dissecting his words or staring at the ceiling, torturing herself with questions of what might have been. Instead, she took the raw, scorching energy of her heartbreak a volatile mixture of betrayal, fury, and a profound, aching grief and she channeled it. She became an alchemist of pain, transmuting leaden sorrow into the gold of relentless, almost obsessive focus.