Elara Hale didn’t remember her mother’s voice.


Not truly.

There were fleeting sensations—like warmth in a dream fading before morning. A scent, maybe. The hum of a lullaby she couldn’t place. A tender rhythm in the background of her earliest breath. But no voice. No face.


Just absence.


Still, Elara didn’t grow up empty.


She had Marcus. Her father’s laughter filled every room they ever lived in. He played piano late into the night while she curled up beneath the bench, fingers drawing invisible notes in the carpet. He taught her to find beauty in broken chords and to listen for what wasn’t said.


By the time she was six, Elara had taken to the violin.

By nine, she played Mozart by ear.

By twelve, she was winning competitions.


Music filled the gap her mother had left behind. It became her second language—the one she used when the ache in her chest whispered questions she couldn’t voice. Each note was a word. Each phrase, a memory she longed to have.


People often asked where she got her talent.


“Must run in the family,” Marcus would say, avoiding her eyes.


Elara noticed. She noticed everything. The way he deflected, how he kept one photo of her mother in a drawer rather than on the wall. How he paused before answering certain questions, as if rewriting truth into something she could live with.


At thirteen, she stopped asking about Liana. Not because she didn’t care—but because she was tired of not getting answers.


At fifteen, she wrote her first original piece.

She called it “Unspoken.”


At seventeen, she was accepted into a prestigious pre-college music program in New York. Her instructors called her a prodigy. The world was beginning to know her name. But at night, alone in her dorm, Elara sometimes stared out the window and wondered who else might know her name—if her mother still remembered it.


Then came her eighteenth birthday.


A warm October morning. Sunlight streaming through the windows. Marcus made pancakes shaped like music notes and gave her a leather-bound journal.


And then he handed her a letter.


The envelope was worn, the paper soft at the edges, as though it had been held—touched—again and again.


Elara’s name was scrawled across the front.


Inside: a message written in shaky, familiar handwriting.


Ø Elara,

If you are reading this, then I believe you’re old enough to choose whether you want to know me.

I never stopped loving you. I just stopped knowing how to be the kind of mother you deserved.

If there is any part of you that wonders—who I am, what happened—I will be waiting under the old sycamore tree in Brookhaven on the 18th. The same one I sat beneath as a girl dreaming of you.

With love,

Liana




Elara stared at the letter, her hands trembling.


The world fell quiet. Not in a peaceful way—but in a breathless, suspended way. Like the pause between the last note and the applause.


The mother she’d never known… was alive.


And waiting.