✧ Scene: A Name in the Margins

Back in Cambridge, Aaric had returned to his usual rhythms — or tried to.

But something had shifted. His grandfather’s letter.
The silence in the Mezquita.
Her presence like gravity.

He hadn’t searched for her.
Didn’t know how.
He told himself: If it mattered, the thread would return.

And it did.
Unexpectedly. Quietly.

He was reviewing a paper for a colleague — something on the erasure of Islamic architectural influence in post-Reconquista Spain. He nearly skimmed the citations, until one caught his eye:

A. Zahra Rahimi, Independent Researcher
"Inheritance Through Absence: Reclaiming the Mystical in Andalusian Memory"

He paused.

The name tugged at something.
He couldn’t explain why — but his breath slowed.

He searched the paper.
It wasn’t just the name. It was the tone.

There — in a footnote she had added by hand during a lecture abroad:

“We do not recover the past through ownership, but through listening.
In stillness, the stone speaks.”

His body went still.
That phrasing.

She had said nothing to him in Córdoba.
And yet — he knew.
This was her voice.

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