Chapter 4 - Secrets in the Attic
523 Words
The morning after the whisper returned, Elara couldn't shake the heaviness that clung to her chest. Sleep had been impossible every time she closed her eyes, she heard it again: Find me... The words followed her into dawn, tangled with the sound of roosters, waves, and the distant hum of life in Maravilla.
She tried to move through the motions of the day, boiling rice, sweeping the front yard, pretending everything was normal but her hands trembled when she poured her aunt's coffee. Tita Miling noticed, of course. She always did.
"You didn't sleep," her aunt said, not as a question but as a quiet truth. "You heard it again, didn't you?"
Elara hesitated. "Tita..."
Miling's eyes, usually sharp and knowing, softened. "Some things are better left alone, anak. The dead should rest. Don't go calling them back."
"But what if they're the ones calling me?"
Her aunt's lips pressed together. For a moment, the only sound was the simmer of oil in the pan and the faint murmur of the radio. Then, without another word, Tita Miling turned away.
That silence said more than any warning could.
By late afternoon, the pull became unbearable. Elara found herself climbing the narrow stairs to the attic — a place she hadn't entered since her father vanished. Dust coated every surface, and cobwebs hung from the beams like forgotten prayers. The air was thick with the scent of salt and old wood.
She pulled a sheet off one of the tables and uncovered boxes filled with her father's notebooks, sketches, and maps of the coastline. He'd been obsessed with the sea, always drawing its curves, tracing its secrets.
Her fingers brushed against something wedged beneath the old study desk, a small wooden box, carved with initials she recognized instantly: E.S. and R.R.
Her breath caught. R.R. Rivera.
The box creaked open, revealing a bundle of letters, brittle with age, and a single photograph.
In it, her father stood beside a woman she didn't recognize. The woman's smile was faint, almost secretive, and behind them stood the old Rivera mansion — years before it decayed into silence. On the back of the photo, a date was written in her father's handwriting. June 17, 2002.
That was three years before she was born.
Elara's stomach twisted. Questions began to crowd her mind, sharp and unrelenting. Who was this woman? Why was her father with someone from the Rivera family, the same family everyone in town whispered about but never named aloud?
The floorboards creaked behind her.
She turned sharply, her pulse spiking, but no one was there. Just the soft hum of the wind pressing against the roof.
And then she heard it again.
"Elara..."
The voice came from the corner of the attic, where the light didn't reach. It wasn't frightening this time, just sad, broken, like a memory trying to speak.
Elara clutched the photograph to her chest, tears burning at the corners of her eyes. "Papa?" she whispered.
The wind answered with a long, low sigh, and the faint scent of mango blossoms filled the air.
Somewhere outside, a storm was beginning to form.
- Writer
