The box was smaller than the rest, light enough to lift with one hand, yet somehow heavier than it should have felt. Elara turned it over slowly, tracing the faded handwriting across the tag, the letters leaning like someone speaking softly. "The Lost North," she read aloud, as if saying the words might coax a direction out of them.
Inside the envelope attached to it was Irisia's delicate script, the blue ink a familiar curve on the page.
"You've once helped others find their rhythm, but somewhere along the way, you lost your own."
No name, no address, only a cryptic line that sounded like it had been written by someone who knew both poetry and secrets. Elara sighed, pressing her thumb against her temple, feeling the dull ache of too many nights and too many obligations. "Follow the notes, sure, Irisia, that helps a lot," she muttered, and with that, the search began.
The first clue came from the photo beneath the note, a faded picture of Irisia seated beside a man at a piano. He looked to be in his late twenties, his smile kind but tired, his hands resting lightly on the keys. Behind them hung a small banner that read Harmony Studio Annual Recital. The photograph smelled faintly of dust and old glue, the corners softened by fingers that had held it for years.
Elara had not heard of the place before, so she started where she always did when a trail felt thin, with slow, patient work. She dug through old directories, scrolled through forums where former students bragged about recitals, and scrolled through social media archives for mentions of Harmony Studio. She called one of the nurses, then another, the way she used to call specialists for consults during night shifts, persistent and polite. Eventually she discovered that Harmony Studio had been a small music school near the city's cultural district, a place where children learned scales and shy adults learned to play songs for their mothers. It had closed five years ago, shuttered like an unfinished chorus.
She went to the location anyway. The building was still there, a small brick place with boarded windows and ivy at the edges, a sign removed so long ago only the hollow nails remained. Through the dusty glass she could see abandoned music stands, broken stools, and the faint outline of where a grand piano had once dominated the room. The air around it seemed to remember sound, even when nothing played. A janitor passing by noticed her standing there and pausedas he saw the picture she was holding.
"He used to be a teacher here," he said, wiping his hands on his rag, eyes softening. "Alexander something — Rynes? Ryance? He was good with kids. But after that lady Irisia, I think, moved away, he stopped coming."
His voice made the name catch in Elara's chest, a small, sharp thing. Alexander Ryance, she repeated in her mind. It fit too neatly to be coincidence. Finding him, however, proved to be another matter entirely. Every lead Elara followed ended in silence. His phone number came back disconnected, his email returned an error, colleagues gave only vague answers like "He moved away," "He's taking time off," or "He doesn't like to be found." People her age had changed careers, moved houses, gone quiet, and in each disappearance there seemed to be a private story of grief or choice that had nudged them away.
For three days she chased fragments of his trail, walking until her feet ached, following addresses that no longer existed, calling friends who had lost touch. She read old newspaper mentions of music workshops that had stalled, and she sat in her car at night with the small box on the passenger seat, as if its presence might draw out some revelation. Each evening she returned to her apartment more exhausted, feeling like she was pursuing a ghost whose shape she could almost sketch, but not quite. The burden of the task pressed against her ribs like another long shift.
The fourth morning she found herself sitting outside an old instrument repair shop Irisia had once visited. The bell over the door chimed when she pushed it open, the scent of varnish and metal rising to meet her. The elderly owner looked up, spectacles sliding down his nose, and the moment she said Irisia's name, the man brightened with an odd, immediate recognition.
"Ah yes, Miss Dawn, such a kind girl," the man said. His hands, stained with years of tuning, moved with practiced care as he rummaged. "She used to come here with a man, tall fellow, brown hair. He tuned the pianos himself. Said he hated letting others do it because each instrument had its own soul."
Elara felt a small, sudden rush of hope. "Do you know where he is now?" she asked, trying to keep the plea out of her voice.
The man tapped his chin, then sighed. "He left a forwarding address once, something in the north part of the city. But that was years ago. Still, maybe try there." He shuffled through a drawer, producing a torn envelope with a faded return address. It was more than she had the day before, enough to make the path less indefinite.
The address led her to a quiet residential area on the edge of the city, where the traffic thinned and houses leaned toward one another like old friends. Row houses lined the narrow streets, their gardens overgrown, hedges unruly, fences softened with age. She parked a block away, clutching the small box in her hand, feeling its weight now as something charged with responsibility rather than object.
The number on the mailbox matched. The house looked tired but lived in, curtains drawn but not closed, a small porch with a single rocking chair. A faint sound drifted through the window, hesitant, uneven piano notes played by someone who had not touched the instrument in a long time. Elara's breath hitched because she recognized the melody, one Irisia had composed and played during student concerts, called A Sky Without a North Star. The line rose and fell with the kind of aching that belonged to memory, fragile and relentless.
Her pulse quickened in her throat. She stepped closer, heart pounding against her ribs, and raised her hand to knock, but stopped halfway. Through the thin curtain she saw the arc of a back, the silver at his temples, the way his shoulders dipped when his fingers mislaid a note. Through that small slit in fabric she caught a glimpse of Alexander Ryance at the piano.
He was older than the picture in the box had shown, hair a little longer and touched with gray, posture heavier as if sorrow had pulled on him gently and consistently, but his hands moved with the same quiet grace, trembling yet careful. When he played, the room seemed to lean in. The melody he coaxed from the keys was fragmented at first, each phrase a memory forcing itself into sound, but there was an honesty in it that made Elara ache. She watched the muscles in his forearm work, the slow deliberate way his fingers found a place on the keyboard and lingered before moving on, the small exhale that followed each phrase as if he were releasing a held breath.
She saw how, in the moments when his hand hovered over the keys, his eyes softened toward a photograph propped on the piano, a child's smile caught in a frame. There was a tenderness in the way his mouth quirked when the music reached a place Irisia had once loved, and then a tightening when the progression moved into a passage he could not yet complete. At one point his face crumpled, grief arriving like a wave, and he pressed both hands to his temples before opening them and letting them fall to the keys again. The notes that followed trembled, searching for steadiness, and then, as if sensing an audience of one, his playing found a small steadiness, a thread he could follow.
Elara lowered her hand. She was not ready to hand him the box as a surprise, not in that moment when his vulnerability lay exposed and raw. To ambush him would be to risk him bolting, defensive and frightened, and Irisia had wanted this to be a gift that mattered, not a confrontation that reopened old wounds. For now she would keep waiting, learning from the hesitant rhythm of his practice, learning how to approach a man who had lost his way in grief.
She stood in the shadow of the porch a little longer, eyes stinging with unshed tears, listening to the echo of his playing, the irregular breathing that accompanied it. In that melody she heard both the weight of what had been and the possibility of what might be returned. She felt, too, a quiet responsibility settle across her shoulders, heavier than any shift uniform she had ever worn, and more personal than any duty written on paper.
When the final note faded, Alexander pressed his palms together and rested them on his knees. He looked toward the window where she stood, though he had not seen her, and for a long moment he simply sat in the hush, the room around him full of music and absence. Elara took one step back, then another, giving him space to breathe. She would find a way to speak to him, to tell him about Irisia and the small compass that waited in her bag to point him back north, but not yet. For now, she stayed and listened, and in the listening she began, slowly, to understand how a single object could ask a lost person to remember who they once were still clueless on how a single compass can even help this man.What even happened between them?