The old conservatory building smelled of cedar, polished wood, and decades of suspended music.
At the far end of the third-floor hallway sat Room 314—a bay-windowed practice space with a cracked pane and a gnarled sycamore tree pressed so close to the glass it looked as if it were holding the room in place. The school had marked it off-limits for as long as anyone could remember.
Rumors drifted through the halls, soft and uneasy:
The antique piano inside trapped sounds that refused to die.
It played itself after midnight.
If you leaned too close, you'd hear breathing that didn't belong to anyone alive.
Will didn't believe in ghosts.
But he believed in quiet.
Born with mild auditory sensitivity, loud crowds, scraping chairs, and sudden sharp voices felt like needles pricking at his eardrums. Only Room 314 offered the kind of stillness—thick, aged, and gentle—that let him breathe.
He slipped in at dusk, September light filtering through sycamore leaves in scattered, swaying patches, like scattered piano keys.
Two grand pianos stood inside:
One modern, tuned weekly, untouched and dusty.
The other, a faded walnut antique, its keys yellowed at the edges, forgotten for years.
Will only played the antique.
Its tone was warm, low, and soft—never harsh enough to jangle his frayed nerves.
His fingers had barely brushed the cool ivory when his phone buzzed.
Unknown number. No name. Short, sharp, and gone if he tried to screenshot it:
Play the broken phrase. She will hear you. Don't let anyone find the notebook.
His throat tightened.
It was the third mysterious text that week—no caller ID, no trace, like someone was watching him from the shadows.
He knew exactly which phrase the message meant.
Three days earlier, he'd found a tattered leather notebook tucked behind the antique piano's soundboard. Its pages were filled with smudged handwritten sheet music, one melody cut off mid-phrase, as if the writer had been pulled away mid-note. No name. No date. Only a faint burned mark on the cover: a single E♭.
He'd played that unfinished line every night since.
Tonight, he began slowly, gently, one note at a time.
Low. Warm. Unrushed.
The second his finger pressed the fourth key—the missing note in the broken melody—the room shifted.
Not with a jolt. Not with light.
Just silence. Deep, heavy, total silence, like holding his breath underwater.
Sunlight froze mid-air. The sycamore leaves stopped rustling. A low, steady hum thrummed beneath the floor, like a heartbeat locked in the walls.
And then he saw her.
She was seated at the modern piano—the one that sat dusty and unused in his time. But in that frozen, humming moment, it gleamed, perfectly tuned, and alive.
She couldn't have been much older than he was—late teens, quiet, sharp features, a faded light blouse with sleeves pushed to her elbows. A small, distinct bump stood out on her left wrist, right over the styloid process, like a quiet, permanent mark. She sat straight and still, as if carved from calm.
She wasn't fully there.
Semi-transparent, like light through old glass, a silhouette stitched from time.
But her hands rested on the keys.
And she was playing the exact same broken phrase.
Their notes tangled, merged, and became one.
Will's breath caught.
She lifted her head. Her clear, steady gaze found his across the room, unstartled, unwavering—like she'd been waiting for him all along.
A distant, slamming door jolted the room back to normal.
Light moved. Leaves rustled. The girl vanished.
The piano fell silent.
Will's hands hovered, trembling.
He reached behind the antique piano and curled his fingers around the leather notebook. It was still there.
But when he flipped it open, a new line had been added—ink dark, fresh, and identical to the composer's handwriting:
You weren't supposed to find me. Stop playing. They're listening.
He'd held the notebook the entire time.
No one else had been in the room.
No one at all.
The next day, Will learned the truth:
Room 314 wasn't just off-limits.
It had been erased.
The campus map skipped from 313 to 315. The registrar's office had no record of it. Thirty years of yearbooks held no photos, no names, no mention of the bay-windowed practice room with the sycamore tree.
Only one tiny line, buried in a 1998 archived school newspaper:
Composition student Lila Hale disappeared from the conservatory. Case closed. Room sealed indefinitely.
Twenty-seven years.
The exact gap of time he'd felt in the piano's hum.
That night, the unknown number texted one final, chilling warning:
The melody unlocks the space between time. If you finish it, she won't be the only one who comes through.
Will sat on the antique piano bench, notebook open on his lap, staring at the unfinished notes.
Across a locked slice of twenty-seven years, a girl named Lila was waiting.
And somewhere else, in the quiet dark, something else was waiting too.
Their secret wasn't that they could hear each other.
It was that someone had spent decades making sure they never would.