It began with silence, not peace, not relief, just silence.
The kind that hummed in her bones and echoed in her ears long after the truth had been spoken aloud. Elara sat alone in her apartment, knees drawn up to her chest, watching the city through her window as if it could offer some kind of answer. It didn't. It never had.
The truth about Anna was no longer locked behind sterile walls. It sat on her table, inside a manila folder from Bellwood, the hospital where her sister had been erased. Her name, Anna Collins, scrawled in ink on every document, spoke more than any photograph ever could. She hadn't been a delusion. She hadn't been a story whispered out of fear.
She was real. She had lived. And she had died without being known.
Elara pressed her forehead to the cold windowpane. The city below moved as always, cars passing, lights blinking, lives continuing. But her world had been upended. And no one out there knew.
That, she thought, was the cruelest part of silence. It didn't just suppress a scream; it erased the one who screamed at all.
She uncovered the mirror in her hallway first.
It had been shrouded since the night Mara first stared back at her. Since the flickering began. Since her reflection smiled when she hadn't. It had taken weeks to face it again, and now, she stood before it like someone preparing to walk into a battlefield unarmed.
But when she met her gaze, nothing flickered. No lag. No shadow moving where it shouldn't.
Just her. Tired. A little hollow. But real.
"Mara," she whispered, her voice hoarse, "I know who you are now."
The reflection didn't move.
"You're not a curse. You're not trying to haunt me."
She paused.
"You're what's left of her."
A tear ran down her cheek. Her reflection mirrored it perfectly.
"You're memory that refuses to die."
The next morning, she drove back to the house she swore she'd never return to again.
Her mother opened the door with an expression that was unreadable, tight-lipped, shadow-eyed. The lines around her mouth had deepened. Her hair had more grey than Elara remembered. But the thing that struck her most was that Margaret Collins looked afraid.
Not angry. Not bitter.
Afraid.
"Elara," she said, like the name tasted foreign in her mouth.
"I need to talk to you."
They sat in the kitchen, the same one where silence had always been served like a side dish at dinner.
Margaret didn't speak first. She just stared at the steam rising from her untouched tea.
"I went to Bellwood," Elara said. "I know about Anna."
The silence stretched so long that for a moment, Elara thought her mother wouldn't respond. But then, in a voice more fragile than she had ever heard from her, Margaret whispered, "I thought this day would come."
"You could've told me," Elara said. "All these years. You could've told me I had another sister."
"She was sick," Margaret said, gaze fixed on the table.
"She was abandoned."
"She-she scared me." Margaret's voice cracked. "She'd talk to the mirrors. She'd draw strange faces. She said her reflection had a name."
Elara's throat tightened.
"Mara."
Margaret looked up, eyes wide. "How do you know that?"
"Because I've seen her too."
For the first time, Margaret seemed to truly look at her.
"I thought I could bury it," she whispered. "That if I sent Anna away, if I never spoke her name again, the shadows would go with her."
"You sent her to die in silence," Elara said.
Margaret flinched.
"She was twelve," Elara continued. "Twelve, and you let them lock her away. Like she was the shame of this family."
"She tried to hurt herself."
"She tried to be heard."
The pain in Elara's voice echoed through the kitchen like a scream left too long unscreamed.
"I found her drawings. Her records. I found a nurse who remembered her, who said she cried out at night. Called for us."
Margaret's hands trembled in her lap.
"I thought I was protecting you and Isla," she murmured. "I was afraid of what it meant that ran in our blood."
"You were afraid of what people would say," Elara snapped. "So you silenced the truth."
"I didn't know how to be a mother to someone I couldn't understand."
"You weren't a mother to her at all."
Margaret's eyes welled with tears, but she didn't wipe them away.
"I see her sometimes," she said. "In dreams. In mirrors. I didn't believe in ghosts until she started appearing in places I swore I forgot."
Elara's voice softened. "She's not a ghost. She's pain that refuses to stay hidden."
"I wanted to protect you."
"You should've protected her."
Margaret bowed her head. "I know."
There was nothing more to say.
But still, Elara stood and placed a small envelope on the table. Inside was a charcoal sketch of three sisters, Anna, Isla, and herself.
"Her name deserves to be spoken," she said. "Even if it's only whispered."
And then she left.
Elara didn't speak to anyone for three days after that.
She sat with her memories, letting them unravel and tangle and coil around her ribs. She remembered Isla's questions, the way her sister had sensed something wrong, even as a child. She remembered the attic door always locked, the fear that was never named.
She remembered the mirror.
Mara.
Anna.
And the way none of it ever left.
She visited Isla's grave again.
It had rained that morning, and the earth was soft beneath her boots. The sycamore tree's branches were heavy with leaves, casting dappled shadows across the headstone.
She brought a mirror with her—small, oval, silver-framed. She laid it at the base of the grave.
"I found her," she whispered. "Anna. I know what happened."
She knelt beside the stone and brushed her fingers over Isla's name.
"And I found out what happened to you, too. You were trying to tell me. I just wasn't ready to hear it."
Her voice caught.
"We were all haunted. Not by ghosts. By silence."
She sat there for hours, speaking into the wind about Anna, about Mara, about their mother. About the way mirrors now felt more honest than people ever did.
When she finally stood, she felt lighter.
Not healed.
But held.
The art exhibit was titled Refractions.
It was her most personal work.
Each painting was a moment, a wound, a scream, a memory. One showed a young girl trapped in a mirror, hands pressed to the glass. Another depicted three figures reaching for each other across broken reflections. Another was simply black paint slashed across white canvas, like a scream smeared and denied.
The final piece stood alone in a separate room. A large canvas with a single girl, standing before a mirror that didn't reflect her body, but her past.
In the mirror, three versions of herself looked back: the child afraid to ask questions, the teenager who swallowed the lies, and the woman who finally dared to look.
The plaque below it read: "I Am All of Them."
People cried.
Strangers wept openly in the gallery.
Women approached her with trembling voices. One said her sister had disappeared into silence, too. Another said she'd grown up afraid of what she might become if she ever looked too long at herself.
But Elara didn't speak much at the exhibit.
She let the paintings speak.
They always told the truth better than words ever had.
At home, her apartment was quiet.
One mirror hung in her hallway, clean, uncovered, unapologetically present. Every morning, she passed it. Every morning, she paused.
Sometimes she still saw Mara.
But not in fear.
Now, Mara stood tall. Still. Whole.
When Elara looked into the mirror, she didn't look away.
Because she knew who stood beside her in the reflection.
Anna.
Mara.
Herself.
She visited Bellwood one final time.
The building was closing for good. The patients had long since been moved to newer, brighter facilities.
The wing where Anna had stayed was empty. Dust-covered. Peeling paint. The smell of antiseptic and mold still clung to the corners of the halls.
She walked slowly through the corridor, each step echoing in the hollow space.
At the end, she stopped at a room marked 212.
Her breath caught.
The bed was stripped bare. The walls were blank.
But on the far wall, faint and nearly erased, was a charcoal sketch.
A girl with hollow eyes.
Elara raised her camera and took a photo.
Then, with reverence, she took out a mirror from her bag and hung it on the wall.
Below it, she left a note:
"You were never forgotten."
In her studio, Elara began a new painting.
It would take months to finish.
Not because it was large, but because it was true.
Each brushstroke was a reconciliation.
Each color was an apology.
Each layer was a whisper of a name long silenced.
Years passed.
People came to know Elara Collins as the woman who painted pain.
Her exhibitions traveled. Her stories were written about. Her name was etched in gallery walls and whispered by survivors of grief and silence.
But she never painted for fame.
She painted for the girls no one saw.
She painted for Anna.
She painted for Isla.
She painted for the child version of herself who had once covered every mirror in fear.
The last painting she ever made was hung above her writing desk.
It was a mirror.
And in its reflection stood three girls.
One reaching through.
One reaching back.
And one was watching finally, without fear.
Because some reflections aren't broken.
They're just waiting to be seen.