✧ Scene: The Unfinished Letter

 The envelope had no date. Just that phrase:

“For the one who remembers.”

Aaric ran his fingers over the brittle paper.
His grandfather — Julián — had died when Aaric was seventeen.
He’d known him as a man of few words, sharp opinions, and a deep reverence for books.
But he had never known this side of him.

Inside the envelope, folded beneath the sketch of the Andalusian arch, was a letter — half-finished.

“I have failed to return.
Not for lack of longing, but because I could not explain what called me.
When I walked the streets of Córdoba, I felt it.
A breath beneath the stone. A memory that wasn’t mine.
But I chose silence — and in that silence, something closed.”

The ink faded after that.
A tear at the bottom of the page suggested it had been folded away in haste — or grief.

Aaric stared at the words.
He hadn’t known his grandfather had been to Spain.
Much less that he’d felt anything mystical about it.
His family had always spoken of the past in clinical terms — immigrants, conversions, archives.

But this… this was confession.
This was a man haunted by the door he hadn’t walked through.

“I chose silence…”

The phrase wouldn’t leave him.

Aaric rose, pacing.
He returned to his own notes — things he’d written during his early years at Cambridge.
Lines about Andalusia. Islam in post-Christian Spain.
Margins filled with critiques — "romanticism," "nostalgia," "unverifiable."

He saw now: he had once written against the very longing he now felt.
He had inherited not only Julian’s blood —
but his unfinished journey.