The cemetery was quiet. Too quiet.
Even the wind seemed to hold its breath as Aria stepped through the rusted iron gate, her coat brushing against the cold stone markers. The world smelled of rain and earth, of endings.
She had never been here before. Never even thought to.
For years, her mother's name had been nothing more than a whisper her father refused to utter, a shadow erased from family records. Elena Beaumont. The woman who vanished when Aria was ten, leaving nothing but a broken locket and a promise no one understood.
But now, as she stood before the weathered headstone engraved Elena Draven-Beaumont, the truth felt like a storm pressing on her chest.
She traced her fingers over the carved letters, the surname she'd never known she carried in her blood.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she whispered.
Her voice cracked, barely audible against the sigh of the wind. "Why hide who you were?"
