Age 25

A few months after Silvi moved in Jona realized that he was no longer hearing the songs. He could not remember when they had stopped, but for weeks he kept his pendant on even when he was working and heard nothing come from it. At first he was relieved that he could concentrate on the real world, but slowly he began to grow alarmed that something may have happened to her. He felt relief to the tips of his fingers when he heard singing coming from the bathroom one evening while Silvi was at work. In the mirror over the sink he saw the inside of a sink and hands scooping water upwards. Then Veronica's face appeared in her own bathroom mirror, singing a happy song about rainbows with a sad expression on her face. He immediately noticed a healing bruise around her left eye and when an angry yell sounded in the distance she jumped and the song stopped.

For an hour he tapped at his mirror, calling her name as though she could hear him. He did not know what he had missed while ignoring the reflections, but she was hurt and there was nothing he could do. He shut himself in his studio with an apology to his girlfriend and spent hours every day staring at the mirror hanging above his desk. When Ronnie finally began singing again weeks later she was alone and staring at a small screen where she seemed to be having a conversation with a friend who's name he vaguely recognized. A picture appeared on the screen taken from a distance of a man kissing a woman at a restaurant. The song trailed off as a message came in with it saying "I saw him with her again." Ronnie waited but the mirror only showed his own face for days. Finally he started to write.

His third book about a woman escaping an abusive relationship was too graphic for the teen audience. His anger at this person who had hurt her was raw and it came out in his writing. The adult market ate it up. For the first time his fans were mostly his age and older. Both men and women saw themselves in the abused main character and the sales were so high that he was invited onto shows to talk about the story. Over the next few years he would be approached to ask for the rights to make it into a cinema show as well as a live one. His guilt over telling her story, most of it imagined with so little facts available, stuck with him and after living expenses came out he donated the sales profits to a global abuse survivors group that helped men and women escape domestic abuse and get back on their feet. When he finally approved a script for the cinema adaptation he used the royalties from the tickets and store copy sales to create and fund a shelter in his city that offered a place for people running away from abusive relationships. Silvi volunteered there on weekends, teaching basic workplace skills for people who had never been allowed to work before. They found there as an astonishing number of people who had no skills that translated well outside of the home when they escaped. The easiest way for many abusers to control their victims was to not allow them to leave home. Suddenly these men and women found themselves free and had no idea how to even set up a banking system to be able to accept pay for any job that they managed to find. The volunteers at the shelter taught them these things and helped them to find work appropriate clothing and the like. He kept his name off the organization's roster and contributed by providing funds to add to the donations that began to pour in, and agreed to give the shelter it's name, V's Home.