The first time Lyra painted the face, she was seven years old.
She was alone in the corner of her room, watercolors spread out in a chaotic ring, fingers stained with blue and ochre. The rain outside had just begun, soft like a lullaby, and her mother was in the kitchen humming a melody that had no name.
She didn't know where the face came from.
The eyes arrived first sad, wide, impossibly familiar. Then the curve of the lips, caught in a silence that felt like it had lasted lifetimes. Hair the color of storms. A faint scar above the brow
She didn't know who he was.
But she missed him.
And when the painting was done, the rain grew louder — as if the sky, too, recognized him.
---
Years passed. The face returned. Again. Again.
On canvas, in sketches, sometimes even on walls she later painted over. Always the same expression. Always the same ache. She tried, once, to forget him she burned one of the portraits in a moment of fear.
It rained for two days straight after.
---
Now, at twenty-nine, Lyra lived in a rented studio above the cliffs of a town that didn't belong to her. She had come to the coast to "heal," as the therapist in Paris had suggested, but what she really sought was silence the kind that let old things resurface.
The studio had no television. No distractions. Only a large window that overlooked the sea, an easel facing the storm, and shelves of canvas she had dragged from old thrift shops. She painted every day. She tried to paint other things trees, clouds, even herself.
But always, eventually, he returned.
This morning, the rain had started before dawn. Not the dramatic, violent kind just a persistent drizzle, soft and stubborn. She stood barefoot in the center of the studio, paintbrush hovering, staring at the half-finished face before her.
He was emerging again.
Every stroke revealed more than she wanted to know. The skin was pale. The eyes carried something old. There was grief in the shadows beneath the jaw, and a tenderness in the lips that didn't belong to this world.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
The rain answered by tapping on the glass.
---
She stepped away from the canvas and opened the window. A breeze swept in, cool and clean, carrying salt and something more delicate a scent she couldn't name, but had smelled in dreams.
The canvas behind her trembled slightly as the wind passed through the room. For a moment, the paint shimmered and she was certain he blinked.
She closed the window quickly.
Her hands trembled.
This had happened before.
---
In the drawer beneath her bed, Lyra kept a box of old letters all addressed to no one. Some were full of words. Others were empty except for a single line:
"I miss you. Even if I never met you."
She had written that sentence more times than she could remember. And she never knew who it was for. Only that it felt truer than anything she said aloud.
---
Later that afternoon, she walked down toward the cliffs. Her boots sank into the wet earth, the sky still heavy with gray. The coastal wind tangled her hair, and she let it. She never fought the elements she had always felt they were on her side.
There was a bench near the edge, and she sat there with her sketchpad. It wasn't meant to be anything just lines, shapes, impressions. But before she knew it, the hand had drawn him again.
She closed the sketchbook, frustrated.
"I don't know you," she muttered.
A voice beside her startled her.
"Sometimes knowing isn't the point."
She turned sharply.
But no one was there.
The bench was empty.
The path was silent.
The sea kept breathing.
---
That evening, she returned to the studio, soaked and restless.
She lit a candle and stared at the canvas. The man's face was nearly complete now except the eyes. She always left the eyes for last.
Because the moment she painted them, he became real.
It was foolish, she knew. Childish, even. But something inside her resisted finishing the gaze. She feared what might look back at her.
And yet, her hand lifted. The brush moved.
A single stroke.
A flicker of life.
And then she dropped the brush.
Because she had heard it.
Music.
Not from the street. Not from her phone.
But faintly, through the wall.
A piano.
A melody.
Her heart stilled.
The air shifted.
She stepped closer to the window. The sound was clearer now broken, hesitant, haunting. The notes were uneven, like someone trying to remember a dream from a past life.
And it was the same melody she had painted.
Five years ago, she had painted a piece titled Melody in Gray abstract lines and fading colors spiraling around a face that wasn't yet his. But the rhythm of the brush, the way the paint flowed it had mimicked these exact notes.
She never knew why.
Now, she did.
Her hand rose to the glass.
Whoever played that melody… had lived in her paintings.
---
She followed the sound the next morning. Not consciously. Her feet simply moved.
She walked past the cliffs, down the winding road lined with wildflowers still bowed from the rain. Past a stone gate she had never noticed before.
The house stood silent. Whitewashed, two stories, with windows that seemed to hold their breath. The sound of the piano was fainter now but it was there.
She didn't go in. She didn't even step close.
She just stood at the fence and looked up.
And there at the window a figure.
A man. Pale. Slouched over the piano.
She could barely make out his features, but something inside her whispered before her mind could catch up:
Aiden.
She blinked, startled.
How did she know that name?
She turned away and walked quickly back to her studio, heart pounding. Her fingers itched for a pencil. Her thoughts tangled. Her chest ached.
That night, she dreamed of him again.
Only this time, he spoke.
"Don't be afraid to finish the painting."
"You already know how it ends."
---
She woke with tears on her pillow and the salt of something older than grief in her mouth.
She rose, dressed, lit the candle, and faced the canvas.
Today, she would paint the eyes.
Not because she was ready.
But because he was.