The Journal of Secrets

Violet Ivory Miles

Full Name: Violet Ivory Miles
Age: 24
Occupation: Freelance journalist, part-time bookstore employee
Appearance:

Early Life: Violet Ivory Miles was born in Ravenswood, a small, sleepy town steeped in mystery and history. The town, with its sprawling old mansions and fog-laden streets, felt like something out of a bygone era an almost perfect place for secrets to grow like weeds in the cracks of ancient sidewalks.

Violet's childhood was marked by an intricate balance of love and neglect, though she never knew it as neglect. Her mother, Margaret Miles, was a compassionate high school teacher who loved Violet fiercely, but she was often emotionally distant, retreating into her work when the pain of Bill's obsession grew too intense. Violet's father, William "Bill" Miles, a local historian, was the polar opposite of her mother—passionate, methodical, and obsessed with uncovering the town's most arcane mysteries. It was Bill who shaped Violet's world view, even though he often pushed her aside in favor of his research.

As a child, Violet was fascinated by her father's cryptic collections—old books, faded photographs, and journals filled with scrawled notes about unsolved murders, strange disappearances, and the eerie events tied to her birthday. Bill was a man of obsessions, diving headfirst into mysteries with a single-minded intensity. Violet craved his attention, but he was always just a little too caught up in his work, too lost in his theories to notice his daughter's yearning.

Violet grew up in the shadow of her father's pursuit of truth a shadow that felt both protective and suffocating. She inherited his sharp mind and love for solving puzzles, but where her father saw only facts, Violet saw feelings the stories behind those facts. She became a storyteller early on, using words and writing to express what she couldn't say out loud. A journaler at heart, she began to document her own thoughts and the mystery of the world around her, even before she knew that her own life was entangled in a story bigger than she could ever imagine.

The Tragedy: When Violet turned 16, the unthinkable happened. On the morning of her birthday, her father, Bill Miles, was found murdered in his study. The cause was blunt force trauma, but the details were strange no signs of forced entry, nothing stolen, and no obvious motive. The police investigation led nowhere, and the case was ruled a random act of violence. But for Violet, it felt anything but random.

In the days before his death, Bill had been consumed by a theory, something he'd been investigating for months. He believed there was a pattern to the murders in Ravenswood, all of which occurred on Violet's birthday, a pattern that connected the killings to the town's darkest secrets. Violet could remember the stories he'd told her, late at night, over cups of cold coffee, about how the deaths seemed to follow a strange cycle, always drawing closer to her as the years went by.

Violet had no idea who could've killed her father, but the question of why haunted her. Why would someone kill a man so obsessed with history? Why on her birthday? Was it a coincidence, or was she, somehow, the target?

Her mother, Margaret, shut down emotionally after Bill's death. She avoided the subject altogether, forcing Violet to navigate her grief alone. The lack of answers drove a wedge between them, and Violet became determined to uncover the truth. Her need for answers, the mystery of her father's death, and the connection to the murders on her birthday became the obsession that would shape her life.

A Life Devoted to Truth: By 18, Violet had thrown herself into her studies journalism hoping to find a way to tell stories the way her father had. But she soon realized that journalism wasn't just about stories it was about truths that people didn't want to face. For Violet, truth became a compulsion. She returned to Ravenswood after college, working as a freelance journalist with the goal of investigating her father's unsolved murder and the decade-long pattern of deaths that occurred on her birthday.