The night Elara Hale was born, thunder rolled across the sky like a warning. Rain lashed against the hospital windows as Liana gripped the edge of the bed, her face pale, her breaths sharp and uneven.


Marcus held her hand, whispering encouragement, his fingers trembling with fear. He had never seen Liana so fragile—her strength, usually quiet and constant, had cracked into pieces under the weight of pain and panic.


The labor was long. Twenty-one hours. Complications. A weak heartbeat. Doctors moved with quick, clipped urgency. Liana drifted in and out of consciousness, and at one point Marcus thought he’d lose them both.


But just after 3:00 a.m., a thin cry split the sterile air.


“It’s a girl,” the nurse announced softly, placing the tiny bundle against Liana’s chest.


Elara.


She was small, her face red and scrunched with effort, her dark hair matted against her head. But when her eyes opened—wide and clear, with flecks of stormy gray—Liana let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.


“She’s here,” she whispered. “My girl.”


Marcus kissed her forehead, then the baby’s. “You did it,” he said. “She’s perfect.”


For a while, Liana was radiant. Exhausted but enchanted. She never wanted to put Elara down. She rocked her for hours, pressed her close even when she slept. She hummed old melodies and wrote new ones, sometimes singing softly while Marcus played piano in the next room.


But soon, something shifted.


The brightness in Liana’s eyes dulled. Her hands began to tremble during diaper changes. Some nights she stared blankly out the window while Elara cried in the crib behind her. She flinched when Marcus touched her shoulder. The lullabies stopped.


“She’s not eating again,” Marcus said gently one evening, holding Elara in one arm and a bottle in the other. “Liana, can you try?”


Liana looked up from the couch, hollow and far away. “She doesn’t need me,” she muttered. “She has you.”


Marcus crouched beside her. “She needs both of us.”


Liana’s voice was flat. “What if I’m not who she needs? What if I hurt her without meaning to? What if I disappear like my mother did?”


Marcus tried to reach her, to coax her back from the edge of whatever darkness had taken root. But it grew, slowly and silently, like mold behind the walls. She stopped sleeping. Stopped smiling. And one night, she stopped staying.


Marcus found the front door slightly ajar at dawn. Elara was asleep in her crib. Liana’s shoes were gone. Her coat, too. But nothing else.


No note.


No goodbye.


No trace.


She had vanished like smoke.