The piano was quieter that morning.
Not because Aiden played it softly but because the room seemed to fold itself around the notes. As if the house had decided to listen. As if every wall had tilted slightly forward, eager not to miss a single sound.
He wasn't trying to compose anymore.
He was remembering.
The melody came slowly, fragment by fragment, like pieces of light drifting through water. He didn't try to control it. He let his fingers find what they already knew.
Five notes. A pause. Three more.
A silence so heavy it felt sacred.
He played it again. Then again.
Until the notes felt like breath, until his hands no longer trembled.
He didn't notice when the door behind him opened. Or when Clara peeked in and silently retreated, a strange look on her face a softness that hadn't been there yesterday.
---
Later, he found himself scribbling on the backs of sheet music.
"I don't remember your face.
But your silence remembers mine."
He didn't know who he was writing to.
But the words felt true.
---
At dusk, the house grew heavier. The light through the windows faded into amber. The clocks hesitated again. Aiden stayed by the piano, unmoving.
He had played the melody too many times now. It lived in the floorboards. In the corners. In his ribs.
And he was beginning to believe in someone else's ears.
---
Because that evening, something changed.
He was halfway through the second phrase when he heard it faint, almost imagined:
A breath.
On the other side of the wall.
The guest rooms on this side of the house were unoccupied. That's what Clara had told him. No one lived in Room 7.
But someone was there.
He stopped playing.
Silence followed, thick and alert.
Then the creak of a floorboard.
And something… like the softest gasp.
He stood, slowly, heart pulsing in his throat.
He stepped closer to the wall. Pressed his hand against it.
"Is someone there?" he whispered.
Nothing.
But the air was charged.
And though the wall did not reply, something in his chest did.
---
That night, he couldn't sleep.
He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence the way one might listen to a confession.
At some point near midnight, he rose and went to the piano again.
But this time, he didn't play for himself.
He played for her.
---
The notes were slower now. Full of something unnamed. The kind of melody not meant to be performed, but offered like a memory made audible.
He imagined the sound bleeding through the walls, across the hallway, into the room next to his. He imagined it brushing against her skin, her breath catching, her eyes widening with recognition she couldn't explain.
He imagined her listening.
Not as a stranger.
But as someone who had always known the song.
---
In another room, Lyra sat frozen.
The music had returned.
Not from outside. Not from a dream.
From the other side of the wall.
And it was the same melody she had painted all those years ago the same she had heard in her sleep, the one that visited her when she could no longer bear her own silence.
Tears slid down her cheeks. She didn't move.
She simply listened.
Because she was afraid that if she breathed too loudly, it might stop.
---
In his room, Aiden closed his eyes as he played.
He saw nothing. But he felt something.
A warmth behind the wall.
A presence not named, but known.
He began to hum not the melody, but something older. A tone. A vibration.
And then, without warning, he whispered a name:
"Lyra."
He didn't know how he knew.
He only knew he had always been playing toward that name.
---
The next morning, Clara found him asleep at the piano, his fingers still curled in mid-air. She covered him with a blanket, didn't ask questions, and said nothing about the tears dried on his cheeks.
In the guest room, Lyra woke up still clutching the pillow, her ears ringing with music, her mind a tangle of colors and names.
She stood, walked to the wall, and placed her palm against it.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
On the other side, silence pulsed like a held breath.
But both of them knew
something had finally answered.