Selene Ward – The Silent Anchor

Age: 28

Profession: Trauma Therapist

Archetype: The Wounded Healer

🖤 Backstory

Grew up in a fractured home where love was conditional. Her parents pressured her toward perfection, dismissing her emotions as weakness.

Her only real bond was with her younger sister, whom she protected fiercely. Selene often played the role of both sister and parent, carrying too much responsibility too young.

She became a therapist because she wanted to give others what she herself never received: understanding, patience, and unconditional care.

🔮 Secrets & Inner Life

Writes anonymous letters to strangers — her private outlet, since she never learned how to express her needs without guilt.

Still feels like a child inside, craving parental approval even though she knows it will never come.

Keeps a small photo of her sister in her wallet, a reminder of the only person she’s ever allowed to truly need her.

🌹 Personality Layers

Surface: Calm, intelligent, composed — the perfect listener.

Hidden: Deeply lonely, unsure if she is worthy of being cared for in return.

Core: Strong-willed, empathetic, quietly resilient.

💔 Flaws & Fears

Tends to avoid conflict, even at her own expense.

Over-identifies with being a caretaker, struggles to accept help.

Her biggest fear: failing to protect the people she loves (like she often felt she failed her sister).

❤️ What She Needs from Love

Someone who gives her space to be vulnerable without judgment.

To learn that she can be loved not for what she does, but simply for who she is.

🎼 Adrian Vale – The Man in the Shadows

Age: 32

Profession: Former Pianist → Bookstore Clerk

Archetype: The Fallen Star

🖤 Backstory

A child prodigy, he became famous as a pianist in his early twenties. His gift for turning sound into raw emotion made him adored — but it came at a cost.

Beneath the brilliance, Adrian struggled with bipolar disorder (we can pick another mental illness if you’d prefer, but bipolar naturally fits his swings of intensity and silence).

During a manic period, his behavior spiraled into scandal and public scrutiny. Instead of support, the world turned on him. The press called him unstable, dangerous, “mad genius.” He vanished from the public eye.

Now, he hides in the quiet life of a late-night bookstore, pretending to be ordinary.

🔮 Secrets & Inner Life

Music is both his gift and his curse: he feels sound in colors (synesthesia), but sometimes playing triggers episodes of mania or depression.

Writes anonymously online about his struggles, seeking understanding without revealing his name.

Lives with deep shame — not about his talent, but about being “too much” for anyone to handle.

🌹 Personality Layers

Surface: Withdrawn, moody, sometimes abrasive.

Hidden: Desperately yearning for intimacy, afraid he’ll destroy what he loves.

Core: Sensitive, passionate, endlessly creative, but fragile in ways he hides.

💔 Flaws & Fears

Distrustful, afraid people only see his illness, not him.

Tendency to self-sabotage when he feels happiness is “too good to last.”

His biggest fear: being abandoned once someone sees all of him.

❤️ What He Needs from Love

Someone who accepts his highs and lows without trying to erase them.

To believe that he is more than his illness — that love doesn’t require him to be “fixed.

Chapter 1 – The Quiet Cage

By morning, Selene looked like the kind of woman who had everything under control. Her hair smoothed into place, her clothes pressed and muted, she carried herself with a composure that inspired trust. Colleagues admired her professionalism, patients leaned on her steadiness, strangers sometimes mistook her silence for confidence. It was easier that way — to let people think calm was her nature, not her armor.

But beneath the surface, Selene’s calm was brittle. It wasn’t serenity, but survival. Years of being the mediator in her parents’ cold and chaotic home had taught her to keep her voice soft, her expression neutral, her anger swallowed before it could burn her alive. She had become a master at appearing unshaken, but inside she was still the child who had learned that her feelings didn’t matter — only her usefulness.

In her apartment, the mask slipped. She kept everything clean, almost obsessively so, but there was one imperfection she could never bring herself to erase: a photograph, hidden in the back of her desk drawer. She never displayed it, never spoke of it, but sometimes late at night she would pull it out, her fingers tracing the edges as if to anchor herself. The photo showed her as a teenager, protective arm wrapped around her little sister. Behind them, blurred in the frame, their parents were caught mid-shout, mouths twisted in anger. Selene hated the picture, yet it was the truest snapshot of her life — the girl who had learned to shield her sister from storms no one shielded her from.

She had secrets no one in her polished world knew. Chief among them was the habit that kept her from unraveling: writing to strangers online. Always anonymously, always in fragments. She never posted cheerful updates or curated images, only confessions she could never voice aloud:

I’m so good at listening that I’ve forgotten how to be heard.

Sometimes I wonder if I even know who I am, or if I only exist in other people’s crises.

If I vanished, would anyone care beyond obligation?

Selene never expected answers. Yet the act of releasing her words into the void felt like breathing underwater — fragile, stolen, but necessary. And when someone did reply, even if it was a stranger’s fleeting words, she found herself reading them over and over, pretending for a moment that someone saw her.

Her surface life looked steady, but her nights told the truth: Selene Vale was a woman held together by silence, secrets, and the desperate hope that maybe, somewhere, someone might listen back.

Hi guys it's your author, My name is Elizabeth and I really like Reading books. So I just thought why not I can just write my own and here we are.

I hope you guys enjoy it, and please leave yours comments, I'm really curious to see what people think about my book And I would be so Happy Even if I get just one comment And I would love to make Friends too because my life is lonely and boring, so very Boring.

I don't really care about ur Gender,I just want friends and so pls comment.

Chapter 2 – The Hollow Stage

By day, Adrian Vale blended into the background. At the small, dim bookstore where he worked the late shift, he moved between shelves with quiet efficiency, stacking and sorting, his presence hardly noticed. Customers knew him as the aloof clerk who answered questions in clipped sentences and disappeared just as quickly. To most, he was a shadow in the corner, a man defined by silence. That was how he liked it. Anonymity kept the world from asking for too much.

But his silence wasn’t peace. Inside, Adrian carried a storm. Ten years ago, he had been someone else — a rising pianist whose performances filled concert halls, whose name was whispered with reverence. Music had once been his language, the way he gave shape to colors only he could see, the way he touched something vast and beautiful. Then came the crash. His best friend, his closest companion, died in a plane that Adrian had been meant to board. At the last moment, he canceled. His friend didn’t.

Adrian had lived, and that fact poisoned every breath since. Survivor’s guilt wrapped around him like chains. Some nights he still heard the phantom echo of his friend’s laughter, or worse — phantom music, a melody that twisted into accusation. He had stopped performing, stopped playing at all, as if silence could punish him enough to atone.

In his apartment, buried at the bottom of a drawer, was the one thing he could never throw away: a battered notebook filled with his friend’s unfinished compositions. Adrian never opened it, never dared to look at the handwriting scrawled in margins, the fragments of melodies that would never be completed. But he couldn’t destroy it either. It was proof his friend had existed, and proof of the life Adrian believed he had stolen.

At night, the guilt became unbearable. Like Selene, though he did not know her yet, Adrian turned to strangers online. His posts were shorter than hers, sharper, more like wounds than confessions:

I should’ve been on that plane.

Every time I breathe, I steal air that belonged to him.

Some people die once. I die every day.

He never signed his name. He never expected comfort. And when responses came, he rarely believed them. But sometimes, just sometimes, a reply would slip beneath his armor and linger. He would reread those words in the quiet hours of the night, as if a stranger’s voice could momentarily drown out the ghost at his side.

On the surface, Adrian Vale was a reclusive clerk, unremarkable, forgettable. In truth, he was a man walking through life as if it were borrowed time — haunted, unworthy, waiting for someone to tell him what to do with the breath he should not have.

✨ Hii it's me Again, Your awesome Author "Dramatic Hair flip"

I hope you Guys liked if you do please let me know because that will motivate me to write the other chapters