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It's a Saturday afternoon and her husband is at the gentlemen's club while her son is being tutored at home.
She asks the coachman to leave her at the Église de la Madeleine. She will attend Mass there today.
She enters, signs herself, kneels but instead of looking for a bench she proceeds along the nave and exits the church at the first available door. Then it is a rush along very well-known streets and boulevards that she hasn't tread in nearly five years: Place de la Madeleine, Rue de Sèze, Boulevard des Capucines, till she reaches the first stretch of Rue Scribe.
Her heart is beating fast, in time with the quick step she's keeping. At the hidden door she searches in her purse and takes out the key she has kept for so long.
The Opera is whole again, the signs of the fire gone, all of the paths to the tunnels beneath sealed to avoid surprises from eccentrics wanting to imitate the Ghost who had lived below. But no one has ever discovered the access from the Rue Scribe and with barely bated breath she opens the gate and enters.
It's a slow and torturous way down, yet she keeps a fast pace. The church service won't last forever, and she cannot raise suspicion. All along the way she asks herself why... why am I doing this? Why am I here? Why now?
She cannot find any reasonable explanation except for the fact that the sound of a musical box a few days earlier triggered something in her.
The need to remember, to feel a connection. The need to feel close to him.
The boat is still afloat, and she makes quick work of arriving at the house. Everything is in shambles, just as she remembers from that last fateful night.
He had been gathering bits and pieces of what once was his beloved organ when she had found him then, still alive and breathing, but so very forlorn.
She fights the urge now to touch one of the wrecked pipes, as if that would somehow bring him closer to her.
Only when she reaches her room does she feel the tears running down her cheeks. She clutches at the footboard of her bed. Their bed.
"Where are you? Why did you leave me?"
She whispers the words, as if saying them out loud will somehow desecrate the place she's standing in.
But she needs to say them.
She needs closure, because without it the pain she carries inside her heart will eat her alive someday and it is already enough that she has to see his face every time she looks at their son.
She leaves the place just as she found it and rushes back to her life.
Little does she know that on the other side of the Ocean, at that very same moment, a pair of mismatched eyes are watching the sun rising and a wretched soul is wishing it could hear her voice again.