Chapter Text
vienna was beautiful in the spring.
daniela discovered this slowly, reluctantly, the way one discovers things when one is trying very hard not to notice anything at all. the city was all gilded ceilings and cobblestone streets and the constant, distant murmur of music drifting from open windows. it was the kind of city that poets wrote about, that lovers visited on anniversaries, that daniela had dreamed of since she was twelve years old and first heard the vienna philharmonic on her grandmother's crackling radio.
but dreams, she was learning, had a way of turning hollow when the person you wanted to share them with was not there.
she woke every morning at six. she practiced until noon. she ate lunch alone in the conservatory cafeteria, staring at her phone, waiting for a message that sometimes came and sometimes didn't. she practiced again until dinner. she fell into bed exhausted, her fingers raw, her mind too tired to think about the ache in her chest that had taken up permanent residence behind her ribs.
it had been four months since she left milan.
four months since she stood in room 114 with sophia's arms around her, sophia's breath warm against her neck, sophia's voice soft in her ear: "two years is nothing. we'll be fine. we'll be more than fine. we'll be magnificent."
four months since she boarded the train to vienna, pressing her palm against the cold glass, watching sophia grow smaller and smaller on the platform until she disappeared entirely.
the first month had been bearable. they video-called every night, sometimes for hours, falling asleep with their phones propped against their pillows, pretending the distance was just a technical difficulty. sophia sent her recordings of the new pieces she was learning, fragments of compositions she was working on, sometimes just the sound of her voice talking to daniela, like daniela was actually there, “the daniela that sat across her with dark curls, concentrated eyes, soft curves appeared on her lips, and one hand under her chin”, as if to say i'm here, mahal. i'm still here. and i missed you. and i love you. to the stage that hallucinations was starting to form inside my head.
daniela would laughed at her own thoughts. bitterly and quietly judging her sophia until she cried.
oh lord. how could she possibly described how much daniela missed her dearest alma. vienna was so beautiful that daniele saw sophia everywhere. sometimes the sky would be really clear and blue, like sophia’s eyes when she concentrated on finding the notes to a song she just listened by ears for a minute ago. sometimes when evening comes, everything almost turns into black, like sophia’s hair, straight and smooth strands that daniela’s hands would brushed everyday after practices. sometimes she looks above, the roofs of houses are commonly a dark brown red, it reminds daniela of sophia’s cello, the one sophia loves so much that daniela sometimes feels so jealous.
although daniela would never admit it.—
flashback
“sophia! can you just put your cello down for me for a bit please?”
“why-i was just-“
“noo! you have been embracing it for a solid nine hours since i have arrived here. we usually practiced for seven hours, sometimes seven and a half. then we would messed around this building for thirty minutes, then we would come back here and laid down, you would put your head on my lap and yapped about many things or nothing. actually it would be nothing. anyways, you have been ignoring me and i am-“
daniela suddenly stopped mid-sentence. and she immediately felt her face heated up because of the word she just nearly slipped out.
“you what?”
sophia asked, with a huge grin on her mouth that made daniela wanted to slap her beautiful and elegant face.
“im-“
“say it.”
“no.”
“do you want me to say it for you?”
“no.”
“really?”
“yes.”
“im gonna say it if you refuse to say it yourself.”
“no. sophia, stop.”
“no. im not going to stop, mahal.”
sophia was fighting the urge to laugh so hard that her face went pink. and daniela suddenly found it cute.
“are you going to say it?”
“n-no.”
“are you jealous of my cello?”
heat crept up daniela’s face. she shoved sophia’s shoulder and murmured so fast that sophia barely heard anything.
“you were cuddling with it for five hundred and forty minutes and i am not going to let it steal you from me sophia laforteza.”
“dani. you are so weird that it makes me start wondering about the reason why i willingly choose to date you.”
“it-it’s not weird. look, you were actually cuddling it for so long. see? i told you. it should be me holding you right n-or you holding me. whatever.”
sophia would started laughing, laying on the floor keeping herself together and shaking with tears because of daniela’s effortless humor. and daniela, despite the embarrassment, would smiled so lovely that it ached sophia’s heart when she randomly captured daniela’s eyes, despite the silliness she just showed sophia, would looked at her with the amount of love that would drowned anyone if they had to swim in there.
end of flashback.
—daniela listened to them on repeat. she fell asleep to the sound of sophia's cello. she giggled like an idiot listening to sophia’s angelic voice. she woke up to good morning texts that made her smile despite herself.
"i played the bach prelude today," sophia wrote in march. "the one my grandfather taught me. and i thought about how you said i play it like i'm holding someone's hand. i was holding yours, dani. even though you were a dozens of kilometers away. i was holding yours."
daniela saved the message. she saved all of them. her phone had become a museum of sophia's love, and she visited it constantly, running her fingers over the words like a rosary.
but something changed in april. the month of jokes.
---
it started with the video calls.
sophia began canceling them. not all of them—just some. a text would arrive, always apologetic, always vague: "sorry, dani, can't talk tonight. long day. love you." or: "family stuff. call you tomorrow?" or, increasingly: "i'm fine. just tired. don't worry about me mahal."
daniela tried not to worry. she told herself that distance was difficult, that everyone needed space, that sophia was probably just busy with her own studies. she told herself these things until she almost believed them.
but then the recordings changed.
sophia still sent them—every few days, a new video of her playing in room 114, the same room where they had fallen in love, the same piano in the corner, the same light falling through the same windows. but the music was different now.
it was sadder. somehow. daniela didn’t know how she could recognized the sadness in there, but it was so much that it overflowed the cup.
not in the way of practiced melancholy, the kind of sadness that artists put on like a costume. this was something else. something raw. something that sounded like a wound that had not been allowed to heal.
daniela listened to the first one on a tuesday evening in late april. sophia was playing elgar's cello concerto. the first movement, the one that had always seemed to daniela like the sound of someone saying goodbye. but sophia's interpretation was different from anything daniela had heard before. the phrases dragged in places, lingered too long on certain notes, fell into silences that felt less like artistic choices and more like moments of actual physical pain.
she's experimenting, daniela told herself. she's growing as a musician. this is what growth sounds like.
but the second recording, sent a week later, was worse. so much worse that it made daniela wanted to shout at her professor in there and ran straight back to zurich.
it was the sarabande from bach's fifth cello suite—a piece that was supposed to be stately, controlled, almost cold in its elegance. sophia played it like a confession. her bow trembled on the long notes. her vibrato was wider than usual, almost uncontrolled, as if her hands were shaking. and there was a moment, about two minutes in, daniela remembered, where the music stopped entirely—just for a second, just a heartbeat—and daniela could have sworn she heard sophia gasp.
not a musical gasp. not a dramatic inhalation for effect.
a gasp of pain.
daniela played that moment over and over, twenty times, thirty times, until her ears ached and her eyes burned and she could no longer tell if she was hearing what she thought she was hearing or if distance was making her paranoid.
she called sophia. no answer.
she texted: "hey. you sounded different in that recording. is everything okay?"
three hours later, the reply came: "everything's fine. just been practicing a lot. miss you."
daniela wanted to believe her. she wanted to believe her so badly that she forced herself to accept the answer, to close the conversation, to go back to her own practice. but something had taken root in her chest, a small, dark thing that whispered something is wrong in a voice she could not silence.
---
may arrived, and with it, the first heat of summer craved in.
vienna was golden and buzzing, full of tourists and street musicians and the smell of apricots from the naschmarkt. daniela's professors praised her progress. her colleagues admired her technique. even some guys from the drum major started to try to take her attention and flirt with her, daniela would sometimes ignored them entirely. entirely here means really cruel, daniela would walked in a hallway, a boy about a year younger than her would approached dani, with his bad english trying to ask her for a date, daniela would conpletely ignored him, didn’t even acknowledge his presence and walk straight to the practice room. and sometimes, if some guys actually crossed her line, (“crossed her line” her means touched her waist or shoulder, that were and are dani’s last boundaries) she would stopped, ran a hair through her dark curls and pulled their ear to her reach and whispered:
“you fuckass should back off, i have my beloved baby at home and that was very disrespectful of you. little dick.”
oh little somehow she could say that. even daniela herself didn’t even know she could possibly murmured that to ‘an one hundred and eighty five centimeters high with blonde hair’ guy. they were so shocked and embarrassed that they secretly thanked daniela for saying it quietly and privately to their ears. not because it was true (it might be). but because they have never experienced or received a rejection from any girls.
even though her cruelty might be a very bad image for someone, her talent and hard-working just completely blocked them all.
she was invited to perform in a small recital series, and then a larger one, and then a professor from the university of music and performing arts vienna asked if she would consider transferring to their doctoral program.
everything was working out exactly as she had planned.
and yet.
and yet.
she could not shake the feeling that she was living someone else's life. that the girl who practiced paganini in a sunlit room in vienna was not really her, but a version of her—a hollow version, a version that went through the motions while the real daniela stayed behind in zurich, sitting on the floor of room 114, watching a strand of hair escaped from sophia’s delicate and so-beautiful-it-hurts face, trying really hard not to disturb sophia’s playing because she just wanted to reach out and tucked it behind sophia’s ears.
the recordings continued to arrive, but they arrived less frequently now. every ten days instead of every five. every two weeks instead of every ten days. and each one was more painful than the last.
in mid-may, sophia sent a video of herself playing the prelude from the cello suite no. 6. it was a piece that required incredible physical control—wide leaps, rapid string crossings, a kind of athletic virtuosity that had always come naturally to sophia. but in this recording, her movements were careful. guarded. as if certain motions caused her pain.
daniela watched sophia's left hand as it traveled up the fingerboard. the camera angle was not ideal—sophia had propped her phone against the piano, as she always did—but daniela could see enough. could see the way sophia flinched when her arm extended too far. could see the bruise.
it was small, half-hidden by the sleeve of her sweater, visible for only a fraction of a second when the fabric shifted. but daniela saw it. a mottled patch of purple and yellow, just above sophia's wrist.
she paused the video. rewound. watched again.
bruise.
she watched it a dozen times, a hundred times, zooming in until the pixels blurred and her vision swam. it could have been anything. a practice injury. a bump against a doorframe. a hundred innocent explanations that had nothing to do with the cold dread spreading through her stomach.
she called sophia. no answer.
she called again. no answer.
she texted: "soph. please call me. i saw your wrist. what happened?"
the reply came two hours later: "i fell. it's nothing. stop worrying."
"that's not a fall bruise. i've seen fall bruises. that's different."
"dani, please. i'm fine. i have to go. love you."
and then nothing. no calls. no videos. no messages for three days.
daniela stopped sleeping. she stopped eating properly. she sat in her practice room in vienna, her violin untouched on its stand, and stared at her phone like it was a ouija board, willing it to summon sophia's voice.
she tried to imagine what would the bruise looks like if sophia fell from a stair. daniela even tried to do a backflip on her mattress at night and nearly twisted her own wrist.
when the next recording finally came, daniela almost did not want to listen.
but she did.
it was not a classical piece this time. it was something sophia had written—a short, devastating composition for solo cello, untitled, undated, unlike anything daniela had ever heard from her. it had no clear melody, no recognizable structure. it was all harmonics and overtones, glassy and fragile, like the sound of ice cracking on a frozen lake. and beneath it, barely audible, daniela could hear sophia breathing—ragged, uneven breaths that sounded like someone trying very hard not to cry.
or not to scream.
daniela played the recording on repeat for an hour. two hours. three. she sat on the floor of her practice room, her back against the wall, her phone pressed to her ear, and she let the sound wash over her until it became part of her, until she could feel sophia's pain in her own bones.
something is wrong, the voice whispered again. something is very, very wrong.
but what could she do? she was a hundreds kilometers away. she had performances scheduled, obligations, a life that she had built brick by brick in this golden city. a future with her dearest sophia, where they would buy a house or even a mansion in sophia’s hometown — manila, where in every morning daniela could imagined. sophia making breakfast for both of them, and daniela would casually hug her fifi from behind, buried her face in sophia’s neck and breathe in her comfort smell. was there a thing called comfort smell, daniela asked herself. she could not just abandon everything because of a feeling, a bruise, a few strange recordings.
could she?
she called professor bannerman
---
"mia cara," professor bannerman said when she answered, her voice warm with surprise. "you never call. is everything all right?"
daniela hesitated. she was standing on the balcony of her rented apartment, which smelled worse than room 114, which had a creaky floor, which mattress was worse than room 114’s floor, the vienna skyline spread before her like a postcard, and she felt desperately, impossibly far from everything that mattered.
"have you seen sophia?" she asked. "at the conservatory? is she... is she okay?"
there was a pause. a long one.
"why do you ask?" professor bannerman’s voice had changed. the warmth was still there, but underneath it, daniela heard something else. something that sounded like worry.
"i've been watching her recordings. she sounds different. sad. and she's been canceling our calls, and she sent me a video where i thought i saw—" daniela stopped. saying it out loud felt like accusing sophia of something, and she did not even know what she was accusing her of. "i'm probably overthinking. i just... i have a bad feeling."
another pause. professor bannerman sighed.
"daniela, i will be honest with you. i have noticed changes in sophia as well. she has missed several rehearsals. her playing has become... erratic-”
then she quickly added,
”-brilliant, but erratic. when i asked her about it, she said she was dealing with family problems. i did not press. it was not my place."
"family problems?" daniela's heart clenched. she knew about sophia’s family. sophia once talked to her about it after her mom made sophia a call, she was yelling so loud that daniela could hear it when sophia didn’t even turn on the speaker.
”my mama told me that i didn’t send her enough money last month. she was taking care of my ading and kuya.” sophia sounded so hopeless and painful. and daniela hated hearing sophia like that.
"what kind of family problems?"
"she did not say. but she has looked tired lately. pale. and she wears long sleeves even when it is warm." professor bannerman's voice was gentle, careful. normally, it would carry a sense of humour in it. manon bannerman was a very energetic and easy-to-laugh kind of person, that’s why she was always sophia’s closest ‘friend’ even though she was and is sophia’s professor. "i do not want to alarm you, but i think... i think perhaps you should come home. just for a visit. just to see her."
daniela closed her eyes. the sun was setting over vienna, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. it’s so beautiful, beautiful like her. and she had never felt less like looking at a stunning sunset in her entire life.
"i have a performance next week," she said. "the mendelssohn. i can't cancel."
"then come after. but do not wait too long, daniela. some things cannot wait."
they said goodbye. daniela went back inside, sat down at the piano’s chair, pick up her violin and tried to practice. but her hands would not cooperate. they kept playing sophia's untitled composition instead—the one with the harmonics and the overtones and the sound of ice cracking. not to mention, daniela had perfect pitch, and every time her sophia played something, daniela would try to put it into her violin. then smiled because of how beautiful it sounded when the violin and cello mixed together. like daniela and sophia’s souls combined
she played it until her neighbors banged on the wall. it had become a routine since daniela arrived there. even though she played beautifully and painfully, the neighbors could not got used to hear the violin vibrated from five in the morning to past twelve midnight. she played it until her own tears blurred the keys.
what was breaking my pretty and kind heart?
and then she booked a train ticket to zurich for the day after her performance.
---
the performance went successfully.
daniela played the mendelssohn violin concerto with an intensity that surprised even her. the critics called it "electrifying," "haunting," "a revelation." her professors in there praised her. her colleagues congratulated her. someone from a major recording label handed her a business card and said, "call me when you're ready to talk about an album." and winked.
she smiled. she shook hands. she accepted compliments with the automatic grace of someone who had been trained to perform since childhood.
and then she got on a train to zurich.
the journey took eight hours. she spent them staring out the window, watching the austrian countryside give way to the swiss alps, watching the mountains give way to rolling hills, watching the hills give way to the familiar sprawl of swiss plateau. she had made this journey dozens of times before, but never like this, never with her heart in her throat, never with her hands clenched so tightly in her lap that her knuckles turned white.
she arrived in zurich at midnight. the city was quiet, the streets slick with recent rain, the streetlights casting long shadows on the cobblestones. she did not go to her apartment. she went straight to the conservatory.
room 114 was dark.
she turned on the lights and stood in the doorway, her violin case heavy on her back, and felt the weight of four months press down on her shoulders. the room was exactly as she remembered it—the worn wooden floor, the old piano in the corner, the window that faced the courtyard where the chestnut trees grew. but it was different too. colder. emptier.
sophia's cello case was not there.
daniela set down her violin and sat on the floor, her back against the wall, her eyes fixed on the door. her dark curls was now pulled into a messy bun. she looked effortlessly beautiful, so beautiful that sophia would have to stop breathing for a solid five seconds if she was there. but her beauty is not important right now, the importance is that she has to see and know that her fifi is safe and is breathing and is still living. sophia would come. she always came. room 114 was their place—the place where they had first spoken, first played together, first kissed. oh lord, daniela remembered how nice it was, how soft sophia’s lips were, even though it was messy and desperate and teary, how good sophia tasted, like heaven and hell at the same time,
it was hell. because sophia is the death of daniela.
sophia would come here eventually. she had to.
the hours passed.
daniela still sat with her back against the wall, she was now messing with her curls now, messing with the one that escaped the bun and fell to her face.
daniela waited through the night, she didn’t even know why she was so patient at that night, waited while watching the sky outside the window shift from black to deep blue to pale gray. she waited through the morning, even though her tummy was growling because of hunger, listening to the conservatory come alive around her—footsteps in the hallway, voices in the distance, laughters right next to the wall, the sound of scales being played in rooms she could not see. she waited through the afternoon, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, refusing to do anything except watch the door. she refused it herself, she knew it was not good, she knew it was dangerous, but the thought of eating when she hadn’t seen her sophia alive felt nauseous.
sophia did not come.
by evening, daniela's body was screaming at her—hunger, exhaustion, the ache of sitting on a hard floor for nearly twenty hours. her belly started to give her some pain, she usually got it when she didn’t eat, and daniela was really lazy especially when it came to eating. sophia would have poked my ears and threw a package of garlic bread, eggs or whatever she made in the morning at my face and shouted at me because i skipped meals, the thought suddenly crept through daniela’s mind, but she could not move. she could not leave. because leaving meant admitting that something was wrong, and admitting that something was wrong meant facing the possibility that sophia might not come ever, and that was a possibility daniela was not ready to face.
she called sophia's phone for the fourty-third time.
no answer.
she sent a text: "i'm in zurich. i'm in our room. please come. please. i need to see you."
the message was delivered. it was not read.
daniela pressed her forehead against her knees and tried to remember how to breathe.
fuck, if i knew this would happened, i would have skipped the fuck the performance and ran back here
please soph, i can’t bare the thoughts of not waking up walking into this room and you-
you’re not here.
the ragged breath started to appear when the final line swept through daniela.
it was not a lie, that daniela’s hands are shaking so bad right there. she felt so useless.
because she cannot go anywhere except here. because she didn’t know where else sophia could go. because she was so focused on herself that she forgot about her alma..
or that was what she thought.
---
she found professor bannerman in her office at nine o'clock the next morning.
she was sitting behind her desk, surrounded by stacks of sheet music and old photographs of students long graduated. there was a frame of four students, pinned on the wall behind professor bannerman, its quality was really bad, the colour faded, and the paper inside the frame was very wrinkled, but colours are still visible. it was took a long time ago, and professor bannerman looked really young there. she had a very dark brown curls that was totally different from this straight one at this time. she was standing in the middle, to her right was a student with blonde hair, she was so young that daniela thought she was just ten years old, and looked extremely asian. next to that girl was another pretty girl with black hair, mix with it was some pink strands, her parents would have kicked her out of the house at that time, didn’t they?, daniela thought. and to the left of professor bannerman’s, stood a girl with red hair, her skin was dark and it looked perfectly beautiful to her.
it was her friends, daniela think so.
but the whole thoughts disappeared when she looked up and saw daniela in the doorway—pale, hollow-eyed, still wearing the same clothes she had traveled in—her face went very still.
"daniela," she said. "you came."
"sophia won't answer me." daniela's voice was raw, scraped thin by hours of disuse. "i've been waiting in room 114 since midnight. she didn't come. she always comes. why didn't she come?"
professor bannerman stood up slowly. she was a very stunning middle-aged woman—forty-one, with arthritic hands and a kind face and eyes that had seen too much in her long career. she crossed the room and closed the door behind daniela, and then she took her hands in hers.
"sit down," he said.
"i don't want to sit down. i want you to tell me where sophia is."
"sit down, daniela. please."
”please professor. i-i can’t. just tell me where the heck sophia-“
daniela stopped immediately after realized how rude she just been. panic attacked her, and with all the worry and fear she had before, her face crumbled.
”pro-professor, i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to. im sorry. i was so worried i lost my mind. im so so sorr-“
”hey, hey, hey. it’s okay, i understand you, i understand you. calm down, daniela. i’m here. sit down and we’ll talk, okay?”
something in her voice—the gentleness of it, the terrible, careful gentleness—made her legs buckle. she sank into the chair across from manon’s desk, her hands trembling, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.
professor bannerman sat down across from her. she did not speak for a long moment. she looked at her hands, at the window, at the photograph of her old friends on the wall. anywhere but at daniela's face.
"daniela," she said finally, "i have to tell you something. and i need you to try to stay calm. can you do that for me?"
"just tell me. please, please."
she took a breath. and then she told her.
she told her about the phone call she had received three weeks ago, from sophia's mother. she told her about the hospital, the emergency room, the doctors who had tried and failed. she told her about the injuries—the broken ribs, the internal bleeding, the trauma to the head that had been too severe for surgery. she told her about the police investigation, about the father who had done these things, about the mother who had known and done nothing.
“i’m so sorry and i feel so bad to be the one who has to tell you this. please forgive me, daniela. i-i received a phone call about three weeks ago. sophia’s mom called me, she said that sophia…”
”sophia what, please professor..”
”she had just died. she didn’t tell me the whole story. it-it’s just that sophia’s dad was having a very bad night, and he took all of it on his daughter..”
oh dearest god, daniela nearly collapsed after she heard the word “died”. she wished, she wished so deeply and sincerely that she just heard a mistake. but she kept it inside her was now a dead heart. she tried to keep it in front of her professor’s face, because she had to hear all of it. all of the truth. the terrifying truth.
”i immediately ran to the hospital, the one that sophia’s mom told me where she was. i didn’t meet her mom there. she was probably home prepare for soph’s funeral arrangements. i asked the hospital staff what happened to our sophia..”
”da-daniela. it was so painful i can’t even stand there.”
manon’s voice broke right there. she thought about that night again, listened to the staff’s voice with a broken heart.
“our sophia had an internal bleeding, oh my- please, i can’t.”
she said it, a sob nearly escaped, but she hold it. what would happened if she also broke right there? daniela was so lost that manon had to keep herself stable to hold daniela.
”her ribs broke. god. her head was covered in blood because of the glass. th-the wine bottle glass…..”
she told her that sophia had died on the operating table at 1:07am on may 17th.
he told her that the funeral had been held six days later, in a small church in the countryside outside zurich, that only a handful of people had attended because sophia's family had wanted to keep everything private. the doctors had been really suspicious due to the severity of sophia’s injury that was caused by “falling downstairs”. they had a clinical suspicion, compared sophia’s injuries to what her mom told, everything did not match. therefore, they reported the case to the police. in the swiss healthcare system, medical confidentiality is very important, but when the doctor was able to obtain permission from higher authorities regarding sophia’s case, and thus take her life, they successfully waived their medical confidentiality obligations to report it to the police. furthermore, as sophia's life had been stolen, so there was no reason for them to stop giving the police the right to investigate the matter. manon bannerman was so wise in knowledge, she knew almost everything, just not a master in it. but how can daniela absorbed all of that information in her head, when only sophia’s smile, sophia’s voice, sophia’s face and sophia’s everything was covering her mind?
she told her that sophia had been suffering for months. that the bruises daniela had glimpsed in the videos were not accidents. that the pain in her playing had not been artistic experimentation. that every recording, every message, every "i'm fine" had been a lie designed to protect daniela from a truth she could not have changed even if she had known it.
she told her that sophia's last words, according to the nurses, had been daniela's name.
“my dear, one of the nurse that was on duty in that room passed by. she heard that i was talking about sophia. a-and she stopped right next to me, her eyes were like a-an ocean of wonder, she said to me many things, i’m sorry i can’t remember all of them, but-“
professor bannmerman paused there, trying to recall everything happened that night.
“th-the staff asked me do i know anybody named dani, then she told me this: ‘her last sentence was ‘i’m sorry, dani.’”
daniela shook so bad after that. her whole body racking with everything, her guilt, her regret, her sadness, her breakdown, her anger, her hatred, and her love.
she just sat on the chair and hugged herself. her shoulder shook violently that manon who was crying had to keep daniela in her arms. trying to stop the shaking.
---
daniela did not scream.
that was what surprised her most, afterward—the silence of her own destruction, even though she was shaking so badly in professor bannerman’s room before. she had imagined grief as something loud, something operatic, something that demanded to be witnessed. but this was not like that. this was a quiet thing. a cold thing. a thing that crept into her chest and wrapped itself around her heart and squeezed until there was nothing left but absence.
"daniela?" professor bannerma’s shaky voice came from very far away. "daniela, can you hear me?"
she heard her. she heard the words. but they did not mean anything. language had become a foreign country, and she had forgotten how to speak its language.
she stood up. her body still ‘confused’. her eyes were so hollow, so so hollow.
her legs held. that surprised her too. she walked to the door, opened it, stepped into the hallway. professor bannerman called after her, but she did not turn around. she walked down the corridor, past the practice rooms, past the lecture halls, past the courtyard where the chestnut trees were in full bloom.
she walked to room 114.
daniela kept her head down painfully. she closed the door behind her. she locked it. she stood in the center of the room—the room where sophia had first smiled at her, the room where they had played the chaconne together, the room where sophia had said "i've been in love with you since the day you played the chaconne and looked at me like i was the first person who had ever heard you", the room where daniela was so brave and shocked and happy that she kissed her sophia immediately, the room where they would peacefully laid down on the floor, faced each others and smiled like idiots. the room where daniela’s hand would find sophia’s face, and sophia’s hand would came up and placed it on daniela’s hand, they would both smiled and daniela would said something without sounds and sophia would say “i can’t read lips, idiot.” and the only thing daniela had ever said was..
”te amo, mi todo” —and she waited for the grief to hit her.
it did not hit her.
it drowned her.
it came from everywhere at once—from the piano bench where sophia had sat, from the floor where they had fallen asleep, from the window where the afternoon light had turned sophia's hair to gold, from daniela’s hallucinations of sophia standing in front of her with an open arms, waiting for daniela to rush forward. it came in waves, each one taller than the last, and daniela sank beneath them without a sound.
she fell to her knees. then to her hands. then to the floor, her forehead pressed against the cold wood, her arms wrapped around her head like she was trying to hold herself together.
sophia is dead.
the words were a stone in her throat. she could not swallow them. she could not spit them out. they just sat there, heavy and immovable, while her mind screamed and her body refused to make a sound.
sophia is dead. sophia is dead. sophia is dead.
she had said the name so many times. in her prayers, in her dreams, in the quiet moments before sleep when she would whisper it into the darkness just to feel it on her tongue. sophia. sophia. sophia. it had been a prayer. it had been a promise. it had been the most beautiful word in any language, in any world, in any possible universe.
and now it was a wound.
sophia.
she began to shake. not a gentle tremor—a violent, full-body shudder, like she was coming apart at the molecular level, more intense and painful than the first one. her teeth chattered. her fingers clawed at the floor. her breath came in short, sharp gasps that sounded nothing like crying and everything like dying.
sophia is dead and i didn't know. i didn't know. i was in vienna practicing mendelssohn while she was dying. i was playing concertos while she was bleeding. i was shaking hands with record label executives while she was saying my name in a hospital room.
my name.
her last word was my name.
the sound that came out of daniela then was not a scream. it was something worse—a low, animal keening, the kind of sound that came from a place deeper than language, deeper than music, deeper than anything she had ever known. it went on for a long time. minutes. hours. she had no way of measuring. time had stopped meaning anything.
”arghhhhhhhh..fucking hell. fucking hell. fucking hell. why…??”
she pressed her forehead against the floor and screamed into the wood until her throat was raw and her voice was gone and there was nothing left inside her but a hollow, echoing silence.
and then she began to laugh.
it was not a happy laugh. it was the laugh of someone who had crossed a threshold and could not find her way back. it was the laugh of someone who understood, suddenly and completely, that the world was not a place where justice lived or love conquered all or anything made sense. it was the laugh of someone who had been broken into pieces too small to ever be reassembled.
she laughed until she cried.
her cries echoed off the walls, so real and so painful it hurted professor bannmerman outside. she completely collapsed on the floor, curled into a ball and covered her face with a-violent-shaky hands. she broke completely. she died completely. she stopped breathing completely. her hiccups even hurted her. she sounded so wounded and it was all covered by guilt and regret.
”oh lord, how could she survived this, my daniela?”
she cried until she could not cry anymore.
and then she lay on the floor of room 114, staring at the windows, with sophia’s silhouette so beautiful it made her heart bleed, and even all of that, all of that brokennes, she felt nothing at all.
---
they found her there the next morning.
a janitor heard strange noises coming from the room—scratching, scraping, the sound of something being dragged across the floor—and called security. when they broke down the door, they found daniela sitting in the corner, her knees drawn to her chest, her violin in pieces around her.
she had destroyed it. her precious violin—the 1782 mantegazza that had belonged to her grandmother, the instrument she had loved more than almost anything in the world—was in fragments. the neck was snapped. the body was cracked. the strings were coiled on the floor like dead snakes.
daniela was holding the bow. she had broken that too, snapped it in half, and was using one of the pieces to carve something into the wall.
sophia.
over and over. dozens of times. hundreds. the name was everywhere—on the walls, on the floor, on the piano, on the music stand. carved in capitals, in lowercase, in cursive, in letters so deep that they would never be painted over.
professor bannerman arrived within the minute. she took one look at the room, at daniela, at the ruins of her violin, and sat down heavily on the piano bench.
oh god, daniela
"call her mother," she said to the secretary who had followed her. "and call a doctor. a psychiatrist. someone who can help. anyone. just anyone."
they tried to help her.
they took her to a hospital. they gave her sedatives. they assigned her a therapist who asked gentle questions about her feelings and her childhood and her coping mechanisms. daniela answered in monosyllables, or not at all. she stared at the wall. she refused to eat. she refused to speak about anything except sophia.
"tell me about her," the therapist said. "tell me what she was like."
daniela closed her eyes.
sophia was tall, she thought. tall in the way of willow trees and cathedral ceilings. taller than her just a tip of finger. and sophia still felt so vulnerable and baby and cute and sunshine and warm in daniela’s hands. she had dark hair that fell past her shoulders in careless waves, and eyes the color of rain on oak trees. she played cello like she was praying. she said that grief was just love with nowhere to go. she kissed like she was trying to memorize the shape of my mouth. she giggled like everything in this world was not cruel to her. she protected me like i am her everything. she warmed my heart in every ways, in everything she did.
she was in love with me.
she was in love with me, and she died saying my name, and i wasn't there.
i wasn't there.
"she was everything," daniela whispered. "she was everything, and now she's gone, and i don't know how to be in a world that doesn't have her in it."
the therapist wrote something in her notebook. daniela did not care what.
---
she was released from the hospital after five days.
professor bannerman arranged for her to stay with a colleague in zurich—a retired violist named sophie, who had kind eyes and a gentle manner and a spare bedroom that smelled of lavender.
the colleagua’s name was so similar to her sophia. so daniela believed she had a kind eyes, warm soul and beautiful heart.
daniela stayed there for two weeks. she ate when sophie put food in front of her. she slept when the sedatives kicked in. she went through the motions of survival without ever feeling like she was actually alive.
but the motions were not enough.
it was never enough.
because every morning, she woke up and remembered. every morning, for one blessed second, the world was blank—a fresh page, a clean slate. for one second, daniela’s mind was still registered that her baby was still here, that she just needed to brush her teeth, change her clothes, wash her face, come to room 114 and she would met her baby.
and then the memory would crash over her like a wave, and she would remember that sophia was dead, that sophia had been dead for weeks while daniela played mendelssohn in vienna, that sophia had died alone in a hospital room with only strangers to hold her hand.
and daniela would stop breathing.
she would lie in bed, her chest heaving, her hands clutching the sheets, and she would think: i cannot do this. i cannot wake up to this again. i cannot spend the rest of my life waking up to this.
she thought about her violin—the one she had destroyed. she thought about the mantegazza, the instrument that had been in her family for four generations, the instrument that had been her voice when she had no words. she had broken it. she had broken it with her own hands, and she did not regret it, because what was the point of a voice if the person you wanted to speak to could no longer hear you?
she thought about music. all those hours of practice, all those performances, all that striving for perfection. what had it been for? what had any of it been for? she had wanted to be great. she had wanted to be remembered. she had wanted to leave something behind that would outlast her.
but sophia had outlasted her. sophia had left behind something that daniela could not touch or hold or hear anymore, and that something was the shape of a hole in daniela's chest that nothing would ever fill.
i cannot do this, she thought again. i cannot. i cannot. i cannot.
she stopped taking the sedatives.
she stopped eating.
she stopped leaving the bedroom.
sophie grew worried. she called professor bannerman. professor bannerman called daniela's mother, who flew in from atlanta and sat by daniela's bedside and cried and begged and pleaded for her daughter to come back to her.
”please dani. my dani, where have you been? im so worried, please baby, come back to me.”
daniela looked at her mother—this woman who had always wanted perfection, who had pushed and prodded and criticized, who had never once asked daniela what she wanted—and felt nothing.
"go away," her voice so hoarse, even though she hadn’t coughed or shouted once.
her mother went away with tears in her eyes and regret crawled up on her skin.
and daniela was alone.
---
on the eighteenth day after she learned the truth, daniela found herself in room 114 again.
she did not remember walking there. she did not remember leaving sophie’s house or taking the train or unlocking the conservatory door. she simply opened her eyes and found herself sitting on the floor of the room where she had fallen in love, surrounded by the hundreds of sophias she had carved into the walls.
her name was everywhere.
sophia.
sophia.
sophia.
daniela ran her fingers over the letters, feeling the rough edges of the wood, the depth of the cuts. she had made these. she had done this. she did not remember doing it, but she believed it, because who else would have?
she sat there for a long time.
the afternoon light came through the window—the same golden light that had fallen across sophia's face on that first tuesday in october, when she had walked into room 114 with her cello on her back and said, "i'm sophia, by the way. sophia elizabeth guevera laforteza. but sophia is fine. or soph. or hey-you-with-the-cello."
daniela smiled. it was a small smile, fragile and brief, but it was real.
"hey-you-with-the-cello," she whispered to the empty room. "i miss you. i miss you so much i can't breathe."
a tear slipped from her right eye. the one sophia once pointed at and said.
”from now on. your left eye is mine, your left hand is mine, your left leg is mine, your left brain is mine. understood?”
daniela would smile like an idiot, a lovesick idiot. she knew it.
”why is everything left, mi amor?”
”because the right one is the one you use the most. and i just want to be the one that can support you.”
but the left hand hold the violin while the right one play. but the left leg cannot disappear if daniela wants to perform on the stage. but the left brain is for logistical things, and daniela cannot have any logic because the only thing that makes sense to her is not here anymore.
the room did not answer. it never would.
daniela pulled out her phone. she opened the folder where she had saved all of sophia's recordings—the bach, the elgar, the untitled composition with the harmonics and the overtones and the sound of ice cracking. she put on her headphones. she pressed play.
and she listened.
she listened to everything. all of it. the beautiful pieces and the painful ones, the recordings from before and the ones from after, the ones where sophia had been happy and the ones where sophia had been hiding the truth. she listened until the battery died. then she plugged her phone into the wall and listened some more.
and as she listened, she began to understand something.
sophia had known.
sophia had known that she was in danger. sophia had known that her father was capable of terrible things. and yet she had not left. she had not run. she had not asked for help. she had stayed, and she had played, and she had sent daniela recording after recording, each one sadder than the last, each one a message that daniela had not known how to read.
listen, sophia had been saying. listen to what i cannot tell you. listen to what i cannot say out loud. listen, and maybe you will hear the truth beneath the notes.
but daniela had not heard. she had been in vienna, practicing paganini, eating lunch alone in the conservatory cafeteria, telling herself that everything was fine.
i didn't hear you, she thought. i didn't hear you, and now you're gone, and it's my fault. it's my fault. if i had listened. if i had come home sooner. if i had paid attention to the bruises, to the silences, to the way your playing sounded like drowning—
if i had loved you better, you would still be alive.
and magically, somehow, in the sickening air. daniela heard a voice,
mahal, you didn’t do anything bad. you were drowning too. please don’t blame yourself
she knew, intellectually, that this was not true. she knew that abuse was complicated, that leaving was dangerous, that sophia's choices were not daniela's responsibility. but knowing something intellectually and believing it emotionally were two different things, and right now, in this room, surrounded by the name of the girl she had totally failed to save, daniela believed only one thing:
i should have been there.
i should have been there, and i wasn't, and now she's gone, and there is nothing left for me here.
she looked around the room. at the piano. at the floor where they had fallen asleep dozens of times. at the window where the light still fell, indifferent to grief, indifferent to loss, indifferent to the girl who had once stood in its glow and played the chaconne for a stranger who would become her whole world.
there is nothing left for me here, daniela thought again.
and she realized, with a clarity that felt almost like peace, that she did not want there to be.
donde mas podria estar si ella no esta aqui? todo lo que imaginaba para el futuro la incluia. todo giraba en torno a ella. entonces, que sentido tiene vivir si no esta aqui, a mi lado, sonriendome con sus ojos mas calidos?
te amo mucho, sophia.
---
she wrote three letters that night.
the first was to professor bannerman. she thanked her for her unconditional kindness, her patience, her decades of dedication to music and to the students who made it. she told her that he had been more of a mother to her than her own mother had ever been. she apologized for the violin. she hoped professor bannerman would understand.
”may i call you manon? after all, you have been so good and so kind to me, that i don’t know how to pay you back. i’m so sorry i have to do this. please understand me. do you remember the first time i met you, when i was so scared because i was late to class. and you were looking at me like you were trying to eat me alive. you were still having some waves at that time. i looked at the picture behind you when i entered your room, and you were having a very beautiful and dark curls! manon, thank you for all of your dedication to music. for your patience to me, i used to play so bad that i can’t even listen to my old record. and you were still there for me, teaching me everything. and you were there for sophia, for the time when she was really lonely, she once told me you were her closest friend, and i’m not lying. you have been so kind and warm when i needed it the most. manon, please forgive me for the violin. i love you, i owe you the biggest sorry, and thank you so much for being the most supportive professor i’ve ever had. i wish i could be braver to live and to pay you back. but…every room feels wrong and she is not there. and i feel like i’m drowning instead of breathing, please forgive me. i would do anything to thank you in the afterlife, if i could be fortunate enough and deserve to see you again. miss manon bannerman, don’t blame yourself, this is my choice, please remember that i love you, really really really.
d.avanzini—your fellow student.”
the second was to her mother. it was shorter. she wrote: "i'm sorry i couldn't be the daughter you wanted. i'm sorry i couldn't be perfect. but i loved someone, and she loved me, and that was the only perfect thing i ever did. please don't blame yourself. please don't blame anyone. just remember that i was happy once. with her. in that room. for a little while, i was happy."
the third was to sophia.
she wrote it on the page of the notebook sophia had given her—the leather notebook with her initials engraved on the barrel of the pen, the notebook that still had sophia's words on the second page: "you are not too much. you are not too little. you are exactly the right amount of everything, and i will spend the rest of my life proving it to you if you let me."
daniela turned to a fresh page. she picked up the pen. and she wrote:
"my dearest sophia,
i'm coming.
i know that sounds insane. i know that you would probably tell me not to. i know that you would say something wise and beautiful about how life is precious and grief is love with nowhere to go and i should stay and play and live for both of us.
but i can't, soph. i can't live in a world that doesn't have you in it. i've tried. for eighteen days, i've tried. i've eaten when people put food in front of me. i've slept when the drugs knocked me out. i've gone through the motions of being alive without ever feeling like i was actually living.
and i've realized something.
the only time i ever felt truly alive was with you. in that damn room. playing music that didn't matter to anyone except us. falling asleep on the floor with your heart beating against mine. kissing you like the world was ending and we were the only two people who knew it.
you were my home, sophia. not zurich. not vienna. not the conservatory or the violin or any of the things i thought i wanted. you. your hands. your voice. your nose. your cheeks. your eyes. your lips. your body. the way you said my name like it was a prayer.
and now you're gone, and i'm homeless, and i don't want to find a new home. i want to come home to you.
i know you're not in heaven. i don't believe in heaven. i believe in music, and music is just vibration, and vibration is just energy, and energy cannot be destroyed. you're still somewhere. in the resonance of the strings. in the overtones of the chords. in the silence between the notes.
i'm going to find you there.
i'm going to play one last time—not bach, not paganini, not anything that was written by someone else. i'm going to play the piece we never finished. the one we were writing together. the one that was supposed to be ours.
and when i play the last note, i'm going to let go. of the violin. of the bow. of this body that feels like a prison now that you're not in it.
and i'm going to find you.
wait for me, soph. don't go too far. i'm coming.
forever and completely yours,
your dani"
she folded the letter and placed it in the notebook, between the pages where sophia had written those first words of love. then she set the notebook on the piano, where someone would find it.
she stood up. she walked to the center of the room.
she did not have her violin anymore—she had destroyed it, shattered it, left its pieces scattered across the floor. but she had something else. a practice violin, cheap and borrowed, that sophie had given her so she would have something to play.
it was not beautiful. it was not precious. it was just wood and strings and glue.
it would be enough.
---
daniela raised the violin to her chin.
she had not played in eighteen days. her muscles had forgotten. her fingers felt stiff and unfamiliar on the fingerboard. but as she drew the bow across the strings, something woke up inside her—something that had been sleeping since the moment professor bannerman told her the truth.
the music.
she began to play the piece. their piece. the one they had started together, the one they had argued about and laughed about and stayed up late to finish. it was still unfinished. it would always be unfinished. but daniela did not care about completion anymore. she cared about sound. she cared about filling this room, this final room, with something that sophia had helped create.
the first movement was gentle—a conversation between two voices, call and response, question and answer. daniela played both parts now, the violin and the cello, weaving them together in a way that was technically impossible but emotionally necessary. she played the violin's melody, and then she hummed the cello's response. she played and hummed, played and hummed, until the two became one.
the second movement was sadder. it was the movement they had written after the night of the broken string, the movement that had come from sophia’s confession and daniela's kiss. it was the sound of two people falling in love despite their fears, despite their doubts, despite every reason they had to stay apart.
daniela played it with tears streaming down her face.
the third movement was the one they had never finished. it existed only in fragments—a phrase here, a chord progression there, a single page of manuscript paper covered in sophia's handwriting and daniela's corrections. daniela played what they had written, and then she played what they had not written. she improvised. she invented. she reached into the silence and pulled out notes that had never existed before, notes that would never exist again, notes that belonged only to this moment, this room, this goodbye.
and as she played, she felt something shift.
the room grew warmer. the light changed—from gold to something softer, something almost silver. and daniela could have sworn, though she knew it was impossible, that she heard another sound beneath her own.
a cello.
low and warm, like honey stirred into tea. playing the countermelody to her melody, the response to her call, the answer to her question.
sophia.
daniela closed her eyes. the tears were falling faster now, dripping onto the violin, onto her hands, onto the floor. but she did not stop playing. she could not stop playing. because if she stopped, the cello would stop too, and she was not ready for it to stop.
i'm coming, she thought. i'm coming, soph. just a little longer.
she played the final phrase—the one they had never written, the one that existed only in this moment—and as the last note faded into silence, she lowered the violin.
the cello was gone.
the room was empty.
but daniela was smiling.
she set the violin on the floor. she set the bow beside it. she walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard, where the chestnut trees were in full bloom and the afternoon light was turning everything to gold.
it's beautiful, like you, she thought. i wish you could see it.
but maybe sophia could see it. maybe sophia was everywhere—in the light, in the trees, in the resonance of the strings that still vibrated with the last note daniela had played.
daniela turned away from the window. she crossed the room to the piano, where the notebook lay waiting. she opened it to the letter she had written, read it one last time, and then closed it.
she looked around the room. at the sophias carved into the walls. at the floor where they had fallen asleep. at the piano bench where sophia had sat, playing her grandmother's lullaby, while daniela cried.
thank you, she thought. thank you for this room. thank you for this love. thank you for every note we ever played together.
she walked to the center of the room. she sat down on the floor—the same spot where she had first kissed sophia, the same spot where they had held each other on the night of the broken string.
and she waited. the pills.
she did not know what she was waiting for. death, perhaps. or sleep. or the sound of a cello, playing a melody only she could hear.
and when she felt a little tired, the urge to close her eyelids was crawling on her skin,
she closed her eyes.
and in the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw sophia.
not as she had been at the end—bruised and broken and hiding the truth. but as she had been at the beginning. tall and golden, with her denim jacket covered in patches and her eyes the color of rain on oak trees. smiling her real smile, the one that reached her eyes, the one that made daniela believe in impossible things.
"hey-you-with-the-violin," sophia said. "what took you so long?"
daniela laughed despite the tears were falling so fast she couldn’t stop. it was the first real laugh she had laughed in eighteen days.
"i got lost," she said. "i'm sorry. i got so lost."
"it's okay." sophia held out her delicate hand. "i found you."
daniela reached for her. and before sophia could dragged her dani anywhere.
daniela stood there, lifted sophia’s hand and pressed a long kiss to her knuckles.
”don’t ever let go of my hand, ever again.”
and the room was silent.
---
they found her one day later.
professor bannermam had been the one to call the police. she had been worried—daniela had not answered her phone, had not returned to sophie's house, had disappeared without a trace. she had searched the conservatory first, because she knew her, because he understood that room 114 was the only place she would go.
she found the door locked. she called for the janitor. the janitor opened it with his master key.
professor bannerman stood in the doorway for a long time, looking at the girl on the floor.
she was curled on her side, her hands on the floor, her eyes closed. she looked peaceful. younger than her twenty-two years. almost like she was sleeping.
the practice violin was beside her, untouched. the bow was beside that. and on the piano, a leather notebook with her initials engraved on the barrel of the pen.
manon’s heart ached in a way she cannot explain. she felt her eyes glittered and her nose got a little spicy.
my babies…daniela and sophia.
professor bannerman did not touch her. she knew, somehow, that she was gone. she had seen death before—her friends, her grandparents, students lost to illness and accident and the cruel randomness of the world. she knew the stillness of a body that no longer contained a soul.
she sat down on the piano bench and opened the notebook.
she read the letter to sophia. she read the letter to him. but she didn’t read the letter to daniela's mother.
and then she closed the notebook, pressed it to his chest, and wept.
---
they buried daniela next to sophia.
it was not what either family wanted—the llorentes wanted her brought back to atlanta, the gueveras wanted privacy after their eldest son—sophia’s father was arrested due to extreme domestic violence and murder, everyone wanted something different. but professor bannerman argued for it, and in the end, she won. two graves, side by side, in a small cemetery outside zurich where the chestnut trees grew and the birds sang and the sound of church bells drifted on the wind.
the headstones were simple.
sophia elizabeth guevera laforteza. 2002–2026. beloved daughter, cherished friend. she played the cello like she was praying.
daniela andrea avanzini llorente. 2004–2026. beloved daughter, cherished friend. she played the violin like she was falling in love.
they were not together in life, not in the way they should have been. married, perhaps. the distance had been too great, the secrets too deep, the violence too cruel. but in death, they were side by side. their bones resting in the same earth. their names carved into the same stone.
and sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the light fell through the trees in shades of gold and silver, visitors to the cemetery would hear something strange.
music.
a violin and a cello, playing a melody no one had ever heard before. a melody that was sad and beautiful and full of longing. a melody that sounded like two people who had finally, finally found their way back to each other.
the groundskeepers said it was the wind. the priests said it was angels. the scientists said it was nothing, just the imagination, just the way sound carried over the hills.
but professor bannerman knew the truth.
she had taught them both. she had heard them play together in room 114, had watched them fall in love note by note, had seen the way their music became one voice, one breath, one heart.
shw knew that some loves did not end with death.
some loves became music.
and music, as sophia had once said, was just vibration. and vibration was just energy. and energy could not be destroyed.
it could only change shape.
it could only become something new.
it could only play on.
---
there is a recording.
it was found on daniela's phone, in a folder marked "for sophia", dated the night she died. she played it before crashing sophia’s name on the walls. it is not a classical piece. it is not anything that was written by someone else. it is a composition, unfinished, imperfect, raw, that sounds like two people playing together even though only one of them is playing.
the recording is twenty minutes and two seconds long.
in it, you can hear a violin playing a melody that rises and falls like breath, like waves, like the slow unraveling of a secret. and beneath it, barely audible, you can hear something else.
a second instrument.
a cello.
playing the countermelody.
musicologists have studied the recording because manon had asked for, after dozens of days, staying in her office, looked at the wall behind her with her friends’ face — lara, yoonchae and megan, asked them could they hear the same countermelody as her ears. they have analyzed the frequencies, the harmonics, the overtones. they have concluded, unanimously, that there is no second instrument. the cello part is an auditory illusion, a trick of the ear, a product of the violin's natural resonance.
but professor bannerman does not believe them.
maybe she had gone crazy because of her two fellow students?
she listens to the recording every night before bed. she puts on her headphones, closes her eyes, and listens to daniela and sophia play together one last time.
and every night, she hears it.
the cello.
low and warm, like honey stirred into tea.
playing the answer to the question that daniela's violin is asking.
playing the response to the call.
playing the love that would not end, that could not end, that was too big for death to contain.
she hears it.
and she smiles.
because she knows—she knows—that somewhere, in a place that has no name and no map and no coordinates, daniela and sophia are sitting on the floor of a room that looks very much like room 114, playing music that no one else will ever hear. telling each others how stupid they look when they fall in love. whispering sweet things that could decay teeth. daniela would sometimes give up the urge to give sophia a small peck on her lips. and sophia would smile so bright and big it melts daniela’s whole body.
“te amo mucho, sophia”
”mas mahal kita, daniela.”
there, they will playing music that is only for each other.
playing music that sounds like forever.
and if you listen very closely, in the quiet moments, in the spaces between heartbeats, in the silence after a song has ended, you might hear them too.
a violin and a cello.
two voices, one breath.
a mystery of love that will never be solved, because some mysteries are not meant to be solved.
they are meant to be felt.
they are meant to be remembered.
they are meant to be played.
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fine.
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author's note:
"the space between heartbeats is where grief lives. but it is also where love lives. they are the same place. one is just simply bitter."
— from daniela's notebook, written on the last page, found on the piano in room 114