The piano sat untouched for days.
Dust had begun to settle on its ivory keys, yet somehow, every time Aiden passed by, it whispered. Not in sound, but in memory a tremor in his chest, a pulse in his fingertips. He didn't remember playing it. He didn't remember who he was. But the instrument remembered him.
The first time he sat down, it was raining.
The kind of rain that doesn't ask permission.
The kind that falls as if mourning something the world forgot.
The room was bare, save for a narrow bed, a window facing the sea, and the old upright piano that seemed older than the house itself. He had been placed here by people who called themselves caretakers, though none had stayed long enough for him to recall a name. There were papers with his signature, a small suitcase with no photographs, and a single composition notebook filled with staff lines all blank.
He didn't know how long he had been here.
But he knew the rain.
He always remembered the rain.
It came almost every day, in different textures sometimes soft as whispers, sometimes angry like thrown stones. But that morning, it was the kind of rain that sounded like a memory trying to return.
He stood by the window, watching droplets race down the glass like silent travelers. The sea beyond was gray, restless, layered in mist. Somewhere below, the cliffside sighed with wind.
On that day, something pulled him not with urgency, but with a silent ache, like gravity that only affected his soul. He walked barefoot across the wooden floor, the air filled with salt and something older than salt. His fingers trembled as he reached for the first key.
A single note.
Then another.
And then… something broke.
The melody came not from memory, but from muscle — a ghost buried in bone. It was slow, aching, hesitant like a voice relearning how to speak after years of silence. He didn't know where the notes were going. They simply arrived, one after the other, as if his hands knew a language he no longer spoke.
Then, without warning, a tear fell.
His.
He didn't know why.
It startled him. Not because he cried, but because the sadness felt familiar. As if it belonged to someone he used to be. Someone who had loved deeply. And lost.
He stopped playing, hands frozen midair.
The silence that followed was not empty it was full. Full of a name he couldn't recall. Full of eyes he had never seen but missed deeply. Full of a goodbye that never got to happen.
Aiden touched his cheek, confused by the wetness.
"Who…?" he whispered, but the room gave him no answer.
Only the sound of rain and beneath it, the echo of something not yet remembered.
---
Later that day, he sat with a nurse named Clara on the veranda. She brought him tea in a chipped porcelain cup and spoke gently, like she was always talking to a child who might break.
"Do I have any visitors?" Aiden asked, eyes still on the horizon.
Clara hesitated. "Not yet, Mr. Ellery. But give it time. Sometimes memories need quiet places to return."
Ellery.
The name sat on his skin like borrowed clothing. It fit, technically. But it didn't feel like home.
He nodded, unsure what else to say.
She left the tea and excused herself politely. He didn't watch her leave. He was too focused on the steam rising from the cup, curling like a question he had no words for.
---
That night, the dream returned.
A field.
A figure standing in the wind, long hair brushing their face.
They weren't facing him, but he knew them.
There was no dialogue in the dream, only a sound. Not words. Not music. But a vibration like a chord struck within the ribs of the earth. And as it trembled, he felt something rise in his throat. Not fear.
Grief.
The figure turned, and their eyes
he woke up before he saw them.
---
The moon had climbed high when he opened his eyes. The sea murmured in the distance, and his fingers twitched unconsciously. He sat up and scribbled something in the blank notebook beside the bed not words, just broken measures. Four chords. A phrase that looped and refused to complete itself.
The way a sentence lingers when the person you love walks out before finishing it.
He played it again that morning on the upright.
And again.
Each time, the same tear. The same pause. The same hollow ache in his sternum.
He walked along the cliff paths often, the wind his only companion. There was a tree bent by storms, halfway dead but still stubbornly alive. He would sit beneath it, listening to the wind pass through its twisted branches. It sounded like humming. Like someone trying to remember a song.
Sometimes he closed his eyes and let his hands move over the portable keyboard he'd been given. Music rose, but it was never enough. Like something vital was missing.
A note.
A name.
A voice.
---
Then, on the seventh morning, she came.
He didn't see her approach. He felt her first a shift in the air, a sudden stillness in the wind. He looked up from his sketchpad, where he'd been notating the rhythm of waves, and saw her walking along the stone path by the fence.
She wasn't extraordinary in the way magazines made people extraordinary. She was real achingly real. Dark hair tied loosely, a canvas bag slung across her shoulder, a long brown coat with paint on the sleeves. Her steps were slow, like she was unsure if the ground beneath her existed.
He didn't know her.
He shouldn't know her.
But his chest tightened.
Something behind his ribs stirred.
The woman stopped near the edge of the path, her eyes on the horizon. She raised her hand to brush the hair from her face. It was the kind of movement someone might make in a memory delicate, practiced, remembered.
And without knowing why, Aiden whispered the word that shattered his breath:
"Lyra."
---
The name didn't surprise him.
It hurt him.
Like something reopening. A forgotten ache reinhabiting its old wounds. He felt the tear before it came. It slid down his cheek like the first note of a requiem.
He pressed his palm to his chest, trying to slow the rhythm inside. It wasn't panic.
It was… recognition.
The woman Lyra? turned slightly, as if sensing something. But she didn't see him.
Not yet.
She walked on.
Aiden stood there long after she was gone, staring at the space where she had been. The wind touched his face, and he imagined it had carried her scent. A trace of oil paint. Rainwater. Something once called home.
---
That evening, he returned to the piano.
The melody had not changed. But his hands had.
They moved with the gentleness of someone approaching a lost friend.
He played slowly, carefully. Each note a footstep into a place he had almost forgotten how to enter.
The music filled the room, brushed the corners of the walls, touched the windows like a lover knocking from the other side of glass. Outside, the sea kept breathing. The wind kept humming.
And Aiden cried again.
But this time, the tears were not just sadness.
They were longing.
They were recognition.
They were hello.
---
In the mirror near the door, he caught his own reflection.
He studied his face. The pale skin. The tired eyes. The mess of dark hair. And he whispered the name again:
"Lyra."
He didn't know what it meant.
He didn't know if it was hers.
He didn't know if she had once belonged to him, or if he had once belonged to her.
But he knew it was true.
And for the first time in weeks perhaps months Aiden felt real.
Not whole.
Not healed.
But real.