CHAPTER TWO

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"

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