The Weight of Silence

"If you're reading this, it means I'm gone."

Seventeen-year-old Ava Winters never said goodbye out loud. Instead, she left behind a diary - a series of raw, unfiltered letters addressed to her best friend, Liam Hart, detailing the spiral of depression that consumed her, the weight of being invisible, and the quiet ache of wanting to be seen but never knowing how to ask.

In the aftermath of her death, Liam is shattered - by the silence she kept, by the signs he missed, and by the realization that he never really knew how much she was hurting. As he turns the pages of her notebook, Ava's voice becomes the only thing anchoring him, guiding him through her final days, her broken reflections, and her unspoken truth.

But the more Liam reads, the more he begins to see the world through Ava's eyes - not just what she lost, but what she longed for. He retraces her final weeks, piecing together the clues she left behind. Along the way, he meets the people Ava mentions but never fully trusted, uncovers secrets she kept hidden from everyone, and begins to question what could've changed - if anything.

Told in alternating chapters between Ava's hauntingly beautiful diary entries and Liam's present-day journey through guilt and grief, The Weight of Silence is a powerful, emotionally charged novel about the things we don't say, the friends we think we understand, and the lives left behind when the silence becomes too heavy to carry.

In the end, this isn't just Ava's story.
It's Liam's, too.
And maybe it's yours.