The music had once filled the house.
Every morning, long before breakfast, the polished floors of the ballroom echoed with the soft thud of slippers, the sweep of skirts, and the faint breath of girls trying to outdo one another. Sarah, still small enough to miss steps but stubborn enough to repeat them until her toes blistered, spun clumsily beside her older sister.
Gabriella everyone called her Gaby, was fifteen now, graceful in the way Sarah was still learning to be. Together they danced, two silhouettes against the high windows, moving in the light that spilled like silk across the parquet.
From the doorway, their mother used to watch them. Her laughter was music of its own, guiding them more surely than the old teacher's stern clapping. Again, my doves, she would say. Again, until the movement belongs to your bones.
But that voice was gone.
The bells tolled on a cold Sunday morning, carrying the family and half the valley to the small stone church. Gaby and Sarah wore black dresses that swallowed their youth, their gloved hands clasped tight as if holding each other would keep them from crumbling.
A coffin lay before the altar, lilies heaped so high their scent was suffocating. Their mother rested within, her face hidden from them forever.
Alan, the eldest, stood stiff beside his father, jaw clenched, refusing to cry. Their father's gaze never left the coffin, his broad shoulders bowed as though some invisible weight pressed him down.
When the final hymn ended, silence followed them back to the mansion. A silence that did not leave.
The house, once alive with music, seemed to sag into mourning. Curtains stayed drawn. The piano in the parlor gathered dust. The girls' laughter shrank to whispers. Their father locked himself away in his study, emerging only for meals, his eyes fixed on some far horizon, as though he had left with her and never truly returned.
In those dim corridors, with the smell of lilies still clinging to their dresses, Sarah and Gaby learned that death was not only a grave in the earth, it could live inside a house, sit at the table, and haunt the spaces where joy once danced. Years passed, and Maggie, the old maid, became the rhythm that held the house together.
She watched the sisters grow taller, their ballet steps sharper, their bond both tested and strengthened by absence. At night she tucked them into bed, humming soft lullabies, filling the void their mother left behind.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours, Maggie paused outside Rick's door. Inside, the master of the house sat alone, motionless in the dark, a man hollowed by grief and hardened into coldness. She would watch him silently, then turn away, for there was nothing she could do.
One morning, the stillness broke. Alan, now nearly a man, stood in the hall as a visiting director and teacher praised his strength in swimming, offering sponsorship and the promise of a future abroad. Maggie poured tea, managed coats, oversaw every small duty, her hands steady where hearts faltered.
Rick, however, responded with his usual frost. His voice was flat, stripped of warmth.
"I will pay for the classes. All of them," he said, as though the boy were a debt to be settled, not a son to be nurtured.
Alan accepted, but his eyes flicked toward Sarah and Gaby, still lingering in the shadows of the hall. The sisters clutched each other's hands, sensing that another absence was coming another voice that would no longer echo through the mansion.
And so the house grew colder still.