THIRD PERSON POV
Ava had always been good at keeping secrets. Her coworkers thought she was just another girl in HR who lived in oversized sweaters and spent Friday nights with Netflix. Her neighbors thought she was quiet, polite, unremarkable. No one knew that under her bed, hidden in a shoebox, lay the messy notebooks where she wrote every fantasy she never dared to speak out loud.
For years she told herself it was only curiosity. Watching. Reading. Scribbling down the kind of things that made her blush when she reread them. But curiosity had teeth, and at twenty-four it had grown into something sharper, hungrier.
So when she clicked Submit on the application, she half expected nothing. The site had looked too sleek, too professional to be real. Her shaky hands filled in her name, her
