There are voices that live in dreams soft, timeless, without a mouth.
And then there are voices that wait behind windows.
Lyra had known both.
She was ten when she first heard the voice that wasn't there.
It was winter. The rain tapped the panes like restless fingers. She had woken in the middle of the night to the sound of wind and — something else. A tone, not quite a word. A breath, not quite a name. It came from the window, half-open, trembling with chill.
She had sat up in bed and whispered, "Hello?"
Silence.
And then as if whispered by air the faintest syllable:
"Don't forget."
She had run to her mother's bed. But no one believed her. They said she had dreamt it. That it was just the wind. But Lyra had never forgotten.
---
Now, nearly twenty years later, she stood by a window once again.
Only this one faced the ocean, and the wind carried salt, not snow. But the feeling… the pull was the same.
She had opened the window that afternoon not to let air in, but to let something out. A name. A memory. A pressure she couldn't place. Something behind her lungs had begun to ache like it had waited too long to be spoken.
She didn't know what to call it.
She only knew the air outside felt like a memory waiting to be heard.
And when the breeze touched her face, she thought no, felt a whisper slide into her chest:
"Lyra."
Her name. Not shouted. Not spoken.
Felt.
Like a note held inside someone else's silence.
---
She pressed her palm against the glass, heart stumbling. The name had not come from the room. It had not come from her mind. But it had found her.
Her eyes filled with tears.
She didn't know why.
Or maybe she did.
Because she'd been painting him again.
Because the canvas she'd finished that morning showed a man standing by a window, head tilted as if listening to something only he could hear.
Because, sometimes, art knew before the artist.
---
She walked away from the window and turned to the easel.
The man on the canvas was almost complete. His shoulders slouched with quiet sorrow. His hands rested on the windowsill. His expression… wasn't sad, exactly. It was waiting.
And his eyes she had painted them at last. Pale, uncertain, but open. Like the sea in the hour before dawn.
She sat on the floor and stared up at him.
"Who are you?" she asked again.
But the only reply was the wind.
---
That night, she didn't sleep.
She lit every candle in the studio and let the shadows dance along the walls. She sketched for hours fragments of rooms she didn't recognize. A staircase with no top. A hallway where the frames were all empty. A door with no knob, but painted gold.
Between the sketches, she kept writing one word: voice.
Because that's what had stirred her.
Not a person. Not a face.
A voice that had called her name without breath.
---
The next morning, she wandered.
Not aimlessly, not purposefully but with the rhythm of someone pulled by something they didn't understand. Her feet led her down the coastal path, past the weathered fence where she had once seen the man at the piano.
She stopped again in the same place.
The wind had died. The air held its breath.
The house stood still.
No music this time. No sound at all.
But she knew he was inside.
And, impossibly, she knew he had said her name.
---
When she returned to the studio, she couldn't paint.
Her hands trembled. Her mind swirled.
So she wrote instead.
She wrote a letter she didn't intend to send. Folded it neatly. Left it beneath the canvas.
*"To the voice behind the window
I heard you.
I don't know how.
But I heard you."*
---
That night, the window opened by itself.
She had locked it. She was sure. But sometime between midnight and the hour just before dawn, the latch had clicked free. The breeze was cool, not cold. The curtains swayed like they had something to say.
She rose from bed. Walked to the sill.
And there floating on the edge of silence was music.
Faint. Incomplete.
But unmistakable.
The same melody she had painted five years ago.
---
She didn't cry. Not yet.
Instead, she whispered into the darkness:
"Aiden."
The name came without thought.
And yet with every truth she'd ever held.
The air shifted. The music faltered.
And somewhere, she knew
someone heard her