Chapter 145: Girls’ Day

Astrid Vale

I woke feeling lighter than I had in weeks, sunlight streaming through the curtains onto a room still scattered with the remnants of last night’s celebration. Balloons drooped sadly near the ceiling, plates sat abandoned on every surface, and an alarming amount of cake remained despite everyone’s best efforts.

Ivy shuffled in a few minutes later, looking equally worn out, and dropped into the chair beside my bed with a groan. "Today," she announced, "nobody is allowed to worry about us. Not the twins, not the group, not Aldric. Just us."

"I fully agree."

"Good, because I already have a list."

She pulled out her phone and began reading off items with the enthusiasm of someone planning a military campaign. Painting. Shopping. Karaoke. Pictures. A movie.

"This sounds like an entire week, not a day," I said, laughing.

"We survived being kidnapped, Astrid. We’re allowed to overdo it."

She had a point I couldn’t argue with.

We started with painting, setting up supplies on the small balcony where sunlight spilled across the canvas. I stared at the blank space for a long moment, uncertain what to actually paint.

"Don’t overthink it," Ivy said, already swirling color across her own canvas without any apparent plan. "Just paint whatever comes to mind."

I picked up a brush and let my hand move without deciding anything consciously, and somewhere in the middle of it, a moon began taking shape, surrounded by scattered points of light I kept adding until the entire canvas filled with stars. I stopped, staring at what I’d created, and understood, with a small ache in my chest, exactly why my hand had chosen this.

Ivy noticed, glancing over at my canvas, but she didn’t push, didn’t force the conversation I wasn’t ready for. I finished it anyway, adding a few final details before setting the brush down.

We headed into town after that, and Ivy immediately dragged me toward the first clothing shop she saw, insisting I try on increasingly ridiculous outfits while she critiqued each one with exaggerated seriousness.

"Absolutely not," I said, staring at myself in a dress covered in sequins bright enough to be visible from space.

"You look incredible."

"I look like a disco ball."

"Exactly. Buy it."

I retaliated by picking out something equally absurd for her, a bright orange jumpsuit that made her burst out laughing the moment she saw it in the mirror. We spent an hour trading increasingly ridiculous outfits back and forth, laughing harder with each new attempt, until I finally found something I genuinely liked, a soft blue dress that had nothing practical about it at all, and bought it without a second thought about whether I actually needed it.

By the time we reached the karaoke place, Ivy was practically vibrating with excitement.

"I’m not singing," I said immediately.

"You’re absolutely singing."

"Ivy—"

"Astrid Vale, you survived an underground kidnapping. You can handle a microphone."

She dragged me up regardless of my protests, and somewhere between her enthusiastic, wildly off-key performance and my own reluctant attempt at a song I barely knew the words to, I found myself laughing so hard I could barely finish the verse. We sounded terrible. We didn’t care.

"We should do this professionally," Ivy declared, entirely serious despite the evidence against us.

"Absolutely not."

We spent the next hour taking pictures everywhere, posed shots that turned ridiculous halfway through, candid ones where we were mid-laugh, one particularly terrible attempt at a group photo with a stranger who’d offered to help and somehow made it worse.

"We never used to take pictures together," I said, scrolling through the results.

"We’re fixing that now," Ivy said firmly, already snapping another one before I could prepare for it.

One photo, taken while we were both genuinely laughing at something neither of us could later remember, became my favorite instantly, both of us caught completely unguarded, happiness written plainly across both our faces.

We passed a shop window later that afternoon displaying a painting of the ocean stretching endlessly toward a star-filled sky, and something in my chest tightened unexpectedly. I stopped walking, staring at it.

Ivy noticed immediately. "You okay?"

"It reminded me of something," I said. "Liora used to ask me constant questions about the ocean. Whether it really went on forever, whether the waves were loud, if you could actually hear them from far away."

"What did you tell her?"

"That I honestly didn’t know how far it went," I said, a small laugh escaping despite the ache still sitting underneath it. "She was disappointed I didn’t have a better answer. She told me surface people were supposed to know everything about the surface."

Ivy smiled. "She sounds like she would have kept you on your toes."

"She absolutely did," I said, and we talked about her a while longer, small things I remembered, her stubborn insistence on trying every pastry regardless of my warnings, her competitive streak on the scooters, her genuine delight over the smallest details about a world she’d never gotten to properly explore. We laughed more than we grieved, and something about that felt right, felt like exactly what she would have wanted.

We ended the day at the cinema, Ivy choosing a movie I immediately protested despite having no actual alternative to suggest.

"This looks terrible," I said.

"It’s going to be amazing."

It was, predictably, not amazing, but we spent most of it whispering commentary to each other and sharing an enormous bucket of popcorn, and by the halfway mark I’d sunk comfortably into my seat, completely relaxed in a way that had nothing to do with danger or investigation or mystery. Just two friends, watching a mediocre movie together, exactly as things should be.

On the walk home afterward, Ivy nudged my shoulder. "What was your favorite part of today?"

I thought about it seriously, running through everything, the painting, the ridiculous outfits, the terrible karaoke, the pictures, Liora’s memory woven gently through all of it without turning painful.

"All of it," I said finally.

Because after everything we’d survived, an ordinary day spent doing nothing more dangerous than trying on absurd clothes and singing badly with my best friend felt like the most extraordinary thing in the world.

"Tomorrow we’re doing something even more ridiculous," Ivy announced. "Oh, and Roshan invited us to another party."

"Absolutely not."

"Absolutely yes."

We argued the entire rest of the way home, already planning something neither of us had any intention of actually following through on properly, and I couldn’t remember the last time arguing over something so trivial had felt this good.