Chapter Text
Ava Maria Silva is seven years old when the world breaks and for a long time afterward she thinks this is what growing up means: something beautiful happening, and then stopping without warning.
The car smells sweet and familiar: a mix of oranges, sunscreen and her mother’s perfume. Curled sideways in the back seat, one sneaker pressed against the door and the other dangling off her foot, Ava watches the world go by. The seatbelt digs into her shoulder, but she doesn’t complain. She drags her fingertip through the fogged glass in careless looping motions. She believes the road looks like a ribbon that twists and disappears ahead of them, silver grey in the afternoon sun, cutting through unfamiliar hills that she somehow knows belong to her. She likes the way the car hums beneath her, steady and alive. Outside, the road curves and climbs, sunlight flashing through pine branches in quick, rhythmic bursts. The Serra da Arrábida rises before them, green, bright, impossibly close to the sky.
Her mother is singing.
She is gently humming a song that Ava swears she has heard before, but can't quite place. Her mother makes up half the words, exaggerates the chorus and taps the back of Ava's seat in time with the music, as though the car itself is part of the joke.
“Sing with me,” she says, twisting around to look at Ava and tapping her leg playfully.
“I don’t know the lyrics.” Ava protests.
“That's never stopped me,” Ana says cheerfully, then belts out another madeup line to prove it.
Ava laughs, sharp and uncontained. Her father sighs from the driver’s seat, but Ava can hear the smile in his voice. João drives with one hand on the wheel and the other drumming lightly against the door, itching to drive faster without an obvious reason to.
They’re leaving Setúbal behind. The port shrinks in the mirrors, cranes dissolving into thin black lines. The salt air slowly gives way to the smell of warm earth and sap. Her parents keep calling this a drive home, even though Ava has never been there before. She doesn’t ask questions. She just accepts that adults are allowed to forget places that once belonged to them.
“Are you awake back there, sweetheart?” her mother asks.
Ava presses her forehead to the glass. “I’m awake.”
“Bom,” Ana says brightly. “Didn't want you to miss this beautiful sunset.” Her father, -without looking-, reaches back and squeezes Ava’s knee, grounding her there like a promise. They’re going home.
The road stretches ahead of them, smooth and winding, pulling them forward. Ava watches it unfold and feels something settle in her chest: the comfort of motion and speed under control; the knowledge of exactly where you’re going because the road tells you.
She dimly realises that she likes this feeling.
Being carried forward.
Not stopping.
She thinks this must be what safety feels like.
When it happens, there is no warning that makes sense later. No sharp intake of breath; no moment when the world pauses to ask permission. Just the sound of metal shrieking and glass exploding outwards, and the sudden, impossible sensation of being lifted into the air, as if the car has forgotten how to stay on the ground. Then everything comes down at once. The world flips. Ava’s head snaps forward, then back. Pain blooms hot and immediate, stealing the air from her lungs. Her ears ring with a high, piercing sound. Warm, metallic blood spills into her mouth. The car is wrong. Everything is wrong. The world is tilted; the windows are shattered; the air is filled with dust, smoke, and the intoxicating smell of burning rubber. Her head hurts. Her legs feel strange. Heavy. Gone.
Her mother is very still.
Ava reaches forward, her fingers stretching through the gap between the seats. She can almost touch her mother’s shoulder. Almost. “Mãe,” she says breathlessly. “Mamã?” The word feels too small. She says it again, louder. “Mamã!”
Her father shouts her name, sounding wild and unrecognisable, but Ana doesn’t answer. The space where her voice should be feels suddenly enormous.
Hands tear the door open. Someone grabs Ava under the arms and lifts her, moving with urgency and carelessness. Pain detonates through her spine and she screams. Because it hurts, because she can’t see her mother, because her body feels broken in an indescribable way, because the world has stopped obeying the rules.
“Mãe!” she cries again. “Mãe, where are you?!”
No one answers. The world fades out before it ever settles back into place.
When Ava wakes up again, everything is white. The ceiling is too bright. The room smells of plastic and antiseptic. There’s a machine nearby that beeps softly as if counting something important. Ava tries to sit up, but nothing happens. Her legs won't move. Panic crawls up her throat, scratching and burning. “Mãe?” she whispers. Her voice sounds wrong. Thin. Lost. People appear around her: strangers with soft shoes and kind faces and serious eyes. Someone holds her hand. Someone tells her that she is safe. Someone tells her she’s brave. But Ava wants her mother. She keeps asking. No one answers.
Later, after the sirens and shouting have hushed down, after all the hands have finally stopped moving her around, someone kneels in front of her and speaks slowly and gently; as though Ava might fall apart if they go too fast. Not all at once. Not in words she understands right away.
Her mother died.
Instantly, they say. No pain. As if that makes it easier.
Ava stares at the wall while they explain. The wall has a crack shaped like a lightning bolt. She decides to focus on that instead. If she looks away, something worse might happen. Her father sits beside her bed, crying quietly. She has never seen him cry before. It scares her more than anything else. “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. “I’m so sorry meu amor.” Ava nods, because that seems like the right thing to do. She doesn't cry. She can’t feel her legs and thinks that might be why.
Hospitals are too quiet at night, feel cold and unwelcoming. Ava learns the rhythm of the machines before she learns to read. The beeping becomes constant, mechanical and indifferent. Doctors talk over her bed as if she isn’t there, as if her body is a problem they’re trying to solve without consulting her. They talk about her spine. About damage. About nerves that don’t always heal the way you want them to. They talk about time, patience, and preparing for possible outcomes. They say she might never walk again. Ava hates that word. “Might.” It hangs in the air like a threat. She watches the adults’ faces when she thinks they aren’t looking: the careful expressions, the pity, the sadness. It hurts her chest in a way that she doesn't yet have the words to describe.
They say “paralyzed.”
They say it's “unlikely.”
They say “we'll see.”
Ava listens. Her father sits by her bed during the day, rigid and silent. At first, he holds her hand. His grip is tight, almost painful. Over time, he stops holding her hand. He sits farther away. His eyes linger on her legs as though they have personally offended him. Sometimes, when he looks at her, Ava senses a sharp, uncomfortable intensity in his gaze. Not grief. Not exactly. Something else. She doesn’t know the word “resentment” yet, but she recognises its shape. She learns what it feels like to be the one who survived when someone else didn’t. When the doctors tell her that she may never walk again, she watches her father’s face instead of theirs. He nods once, as though she has failed a test. That is when Ava understands: her survival is not a comfort. It is a reminder. She doesn’t cry. Crying won't change anything.
Rehab is pain, repetition and loneliness.
There are rooms with mirrors that she cannot bear to look into, and bars and mats that smell of disinfectant. There are hands that constantly correct her posture and voices that count for her when she’s too tired. Her legs tremble violently when they make her stand between the bars. She falls. Over and over again. Her knees bruise. Her palms burn. Sometimes, she cries quietly into her pillow at night because she misses her mother so much that it feels like a physical pain. Sometimes, she gets angry instead. Angry at the doctors. Angry at her body. She is angry at the way everyone looks at her as if she is already fragile. One afternoon, she overhears two nurses whispering. “She’s young,” says one. “But we should prepare them.” Something cold settles in Ava’s chest.
Prepare them.
She fiercely decides then and there that she will not be something people prepare for.
Her father stops visiting every day.
At first, he comes on alternate afternoons, always rushing through the door with polite excuses. Meetings that ran too long at work. Problems back at home. A quick kiss to her hair, a plastic bag in his hand with gas station presents. A teddy bear holding a heart, more Valentine’s Day than birthday, given to her two weeks too late. Ava plays pretend that it's alright. She never cared about her birthday anyway. That the hollow feeling in her chest is only there because she misses home.
But she knows better.
She is still too young when she begins to notice the signs. His eyes grow red, the skin beneath them bruised purple. A yellow tint creeps into his face, making him look sick. The way he cannot stand still in her room without looking like he might fall apart, yet never getting close enough to touch her, never holding her hand. Ava prefers it this way. Because when he does lean in, all she can smell is alcohol buried beneath mouthwash and too-strong cologne. Her father does not smell like how she recalled any more. Another memory of safety, quietly lost.
Eventually, João’s visits thin out through time until they disappear altogether. He stops coming, and Ava stops expecting him to. She learns to sit up on her own. To fall on her own. To stand on her own, shaking and furious, her teeth clenched so tightly her jaw aches. The pain is constant, crawling through her spine and down her legs, electric and merciless. Sometimes it is so bad she thinks she might pass out from screaming.
Instead, she thinks of her mother.
She remembers Ana singing in the car, making up words, laughing at herself. Ava tells herself:
“One more time.
One more step.
One more try.”
She learns that movement hurts but stopping hurts worse. She learns that you can force forward motion even when your body resists. If you focus hard enough and push through the pain, something that seemed impossible can start to happen. Time is measured in bruises, sweat, and the quiet, stubborn, refusal to quit. Her father becomes colder, stricter and harder to please. When she struggles, he calls her lazy. When she rests, he says she is undisciplined. When she succeeds, he tells her not to get used to it. Ava learns that love is conditional. She learns that praise must be earned and that stopping means losing.
The first time she stands on her own, she does it alone, no one there to watch her.
Her therapist has stepped out. The room is quiet, except for the hum of the fluorescent lights. Gripping the bars, her heart pounding so hard it hurts, Ava pushes. Pain rips through her legs, sharp and blinding. Her vision swims. Her arms shake. She almost sits back down. Then she thinks of her mother’s hand reaching towards her in the car, her fingers brushing the air.
“Não.” Ava whispers. She stands up. Her legs wobble violently and her muscles scream, but she manages to stay upright. Tears stream silently and unstoppably down her face. She feels dizzy and nauseous, but alive. She is standing. When the therapist returns and sees her, she gasps. Ava doesn’t smile. She just stands there, breathing hard, refusing to fall.
By the time she takes her first solo steps, enough time has passed since her mother's death for her face to feel half-invented. Citrus on her hands, nonsense lyrics, a laugh that filled the car...But what Ana left behind didn’t stay still. It learned how to move. Ava remembers the road. The pull of speed. The way forward motion felt like safety...
and so she walks anyway.
Years later, people will talk about Ava Silva’s fearlessness. They'll say she drives like she has nothing to lose. They'll say she doesn't know how to quit, but they'll never see the little girl who learned too young that love can disappear in an instant, that your own body can betray you and that survival is not guaranteed. Only earned.
Ava learnt early on that if the world breaks you, you don’t wait for permission to heal.
You fight.