There was something strange about the house on the cliff.
It didn't creak the way old houses did. It breathed softly, deeply as if the walls had lungs. The floors were made of worn timber, smooth from years of feet that no longer walked them. The windows faced the sea but rarely let in the wind. And the clocks… the clocks ticked, yes, but not rhythmically. They hesitated, resumed, paused again as if they too were trying to remember something.
Aiden noticed these things.
Not because he wanted to, but because there wasn't much else to do.
He had been there for weeks now, maybe more. Time refused to define itself. No calendar on the wall. No alarm on his wrist. Just days marked by rain and the silence that came after it.
They told him the house had once belonged to a composer. That somewhere in the attic, there were boxes of unfinished scores and photographs of people no one recognized. No one ever went up there anymore. Not since the storms.
He had asked once if he could look.
Clara the quiet nurse with tired eyes had simply said, "Not yet."
---
His room was on the second floor, west-facing. It had a small iron bed, a wooden chair, and a writing desk positioned precisely in the corner where two windows met. On clear days, he could see the edge of the sea curve toward infinity.
But most days weren't clear.
Most days, the sky hovered like a wound refusing to close.
The piano was in the common room. A worn upright with dulled keys and a personality of its own. It resisted him, sometimes. Certain notes stuck. Others rang out louder than they should. He had stopped questioning whether it was the piano or his own hands.
The melody still came in fragments.
He tried to finish it. He couldn't.
Every time he thought he had the next phrase, his fingers would hesitate not out of uncertainty, but reverence. Like they were reaching for something sacred and forgotten.
---
On the morning of the fourth Sunday or at least what felt like Sunday he found a note slipped beneath his door.
"Room 3 by the stairs has a record player. Might help."
C.
He didn't recognize the handwriting, but the initial was enough.
Room 3 was one of the unused guest rooms, lined with covered furniture and dust that danced in the light like hesitant ghosts. The record player was there, under a white sheet, old but intact. A stack of records leaned against the wall beside it.
He chose one at random.
Debussy: Clair de Lune.
The moment the needle touched the vinyl, the room exhaled.
It wasn't just music. It was memory disguised as music. It slipped beneath his skin, filtered through his ribs, and curled around the corners of his breath. His eyes burned.
There was a woman's face in his mind just for a second.
Paint-smudged fingers. Eyes the color of dusk. A voice that might have once said his name in a language older than sound.
Then it was gone.
He leaned back, eyes closed, listening. The song ended. He didn't restart it.
He couldn't bear to.
---
He began writing again after that.
Not words music. Scattered notes in the blank notebook. Symbols that meant more to his body than to his mind. On some pages, he scribbled fragments of dreams: "the mirror without a frame," "the rain that doesn't fall," "a name spoken from behind glass."
He didn't know what any of it meant.
He only knew it felt like stitching. Like his hands were trying to sew his own soul back together.
---
At night, he heard things.
Sometimes it was just the wind, weaving through the eaves like a lullaby missing its voice. Sometimes it was the sea talking to itself in long, broken breaths.
But other times… it was music.
Not the piano. Not a radio. Something else soft, unplaceable, like a memory trying to be reborn.
And one night, as he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, he swore he heard humming from the room next to his.
Not Clara's room. Not the cook's. A guest room, supposedly unoccupied.
It was a woman's voice. Distant. Fragile.
The kind of voice that didn't belong to the present.
He sat up, but the humming stopped the moment his feet touched the floor.
The next day, he asked Clara if someone new had arrived.
She blinked. "No. Why do you ask?"
He didn't answer.
---
The days unfolded quietly after that. Each one like a page from a book he had already read but couldn't recall the plot.
He walked the garden path. He sat beneath the same tree every afternoon, trying to memorize the shape of the horizon. He played the piano. He listened to rain.
And slowly impossibly he began to feel like someone was waiting for him. Not in a literal sense, but metaphysically. Emotionally.
There was a pull beneath his skin, a gravity that didn't point downward, but toward something. Someone.
---
Then, one afternoon, he looked out the common room window and saw her.
Just for a breath.
She stood near the garden gate, wearing a coat too thin for the wind, her hair wild, her gaze turned toward the sea. Her face was in profile. He didn't see her eyes.
But his heart his traitor heart stumbled.
Not skipped. Not raced.
Stumbled.
He blinked.
She was gone.
---
That night, he couldn't sleep.
He sat at the piano, playing only four notes. The same four notes he had been playing since the beginning.
And then… he added a fifth.
Something shifted.
A breath caught in his throat. A tear slid down his cheek.
It wasn't sadness. Not fully.
It was recognition.
A name passed through his mind like lightning: Lyra.
He didn't know where it came from.
He only knew it was right.
He closed the notebook. Walked slowly to the mirror.
The man in the reflection didn't look healed.
He looked unfinished.
But for the first time, Aiden saw something new in his own eyes.
Hope.
Not the loud kind. Not the naive kind.
The quiet kind the kind that waited in rooms where time had forgotten to move.