A knock came at the door.
Tesni frowned. "Who is that?"
She crossed the room and pulled the door open and the sight on the other side hit her like a physical thing, stopping the air in her chest before she could catch it.
"Daddy." She steadied herself, gripping the door frame. "What do you want?"
Mendoza stood in the hallway looking older than she remembered, or perhaps just more tired, the kind of tired that does not come from a single night but from years of carrying something too heavy in silence. He held out an envelope.
"If you do not want to deal with this yourself," he said quietly, "leave this message for whenever you meet her."
Tesni looked at the envelope. Then at him. "Are you going somewhere?"
"I am leaving for the UK first thing tomorrow morning." He said it plainly, without apology, the way he said everything. Then something shifted in his face, something that cracked through the composure just slightly, just enough. "I love you, Tesni."
He turned to leave.
She felt it rise in her before she could think, something old and aching and too large to swallow back down. Her hand shot out and closed around his before he could take another step. She pulled him back and wrapped her arms around him and held on with everything she had.
"I have missed you, Daddy."
His arms came around her. Slowly. Fully.
"I have missed you too."
The room was quiet and golden in the late light. Aine reached up and let her fingers trace the lines of the scars on Ravi's face, following each one with the careful attention of someone reading something sacred.
"I love these," she said.
Ravi looked at her with something uncertain moving behind his eyes. "Do they not look horrific?"
"No." She said it without hesitation, without softening it into a reassurance. Just the plain, certain truth. "You are a well made creature."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke, and his voice was even, but underneath it something old and unhealed shifted.
"My father gave me these. Every single one." He held her gaze. "Because I insisted on starting college. Because I dared to want something outside of what he had decided for me." A pause. "That is where they came from."
Aine did not pull her hand away. She kept it there, warm against his face, over the marks his father had left, over every line of what had been done to him.
"I love them," she said again. "So you should be fine."
Something in him loosened. He leaned in slowly and pressed his lips to hers, unhurried and deliberate, and when he pulled back there was a smile on his face, quiet and real.
Aine looked at him with her whole heart in her eyes. "I love you, Ravi."
She was pulled from sleep by music.
It came through the walls soft and unhurried, winding its way into her dreams before she was fully awake, patient enough to wait for her to follow it. She sat up, listened for a moment to be certain she was not imagining it, then slipped her feet into her slides and moved toward the sound.
The music room door was open.
She stepped inside and found Ravi at the piano, his back half turned to her, fingers moving across the keys with a quiet ease that seemed to belong to a life he had lived before this one. The melody filled the room completely, warm and unhurried, and beneath it his voice moved, low and certain, as though the song had always been in him and simply needed the right morning to come out.
Aine stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment, not wanting to break it.
Then she stepped forward. "Good morning, Mr Ozanne. Any problem?"
Ravi turned. "Happy Birthday, Aine."
Something bright moved through her chest. "Thank you." She crossed her arms. "But I want a birthday gift."
"Mention it."
"I want you to play the piano for me. Properly. Where I can hear every single note."
Ravi looked down at the keys, something uncertain shifting across his face. "I do not know if I still have my hands around them. It has been a long time."
"Do it already."
She went to the piano and leaned against the side of it, watching him with an expression that left no room for negotiation.
He looked at her. Then he smiled, small and private, the kind that arrived before he could think to stop it. He turned back to the keys and placed his fingers on them, letting them rest there for a moment, remembering. Then he began.
He played slowly at first, feeling his way back into it, note by note, the melody assembling itself from something deep in his muscle memory that the years had not managed to reach. Then the hesitation fell away entirely and the song came, full and unhurried and completely alive, rising out of the dusty quiet of the room as though it had been waiting there all along.
When the last note settled Aine pushed off from the piano and stood before him. She reached up and cupped his face in both her hands, warm and deliberate.
"What could I have done without you, Ravi?" Her voice came out barely above a whisper. "I have a gift for you too."
She took his hand and drew him up from the bench. She felt him go warm the moment his eyes found the wall, the moment he saw what she had placed there overnight.
The photograph. Him, smiling, completely unguarded, wide and real, the one she had captured the day before when he had not been watching. She had framed it and hung it there among all the old, careful, joyless images of the boy he used to be.
"You deserve this," she said. "And so much more."
He stood before it without speaking. She watched something move through him, slow and deep, the kind of thing that does not announce itself but changes everything it passes through. When he turned to her his eyes were full, not falling but brimming, and before she could say another word he pulled her into his arms and held her there, his grip steady and certain and full of everything that had no language.
The door opened.
"You look like an angel, Aine." Hayland stood in the doorway with something soft and unguarded on his face. "Happy Birthday."