Chapter 114: Melodies of the Soul
There were days when Eva felt she had always lived at the Langford estate, wrapped in its golden hush and silver shadows, where time melted into the slow rhythm of study, daydreams, and the ever - pulling gravity of Seraphina.
She had not truly understood longing before Seraphina. Not the kind that curled like a song inside the chest, or made her hand tremble slightly before it reached for hers. It was a kind of longing born of too much joy, too much presence — so full that the possibility of absence felt like a wound before it happened.
And so Eva wrote, because what she could not say outright, she could place between lines. She composed as though her soul depended on it. Her small hands inked musical notations with careful grace, her notebooks filling with delicate scores and verses in L••••, her heart's native tongue.
"Si carmen es, Ina mea,
tunc anima mea est fidicen.
Quot notas teneo, tot amores dico,
et tu, semper tu, es melodia."
"If you are a song, my Ina,
then my soul is the player.
Each note I hold sings love anew,
and you, always you, are the melody."
She brought it to Seraphina that morning, tugging gently at the hem of her skirt as she lounged beneath the cherry tree. Seraphina had come home from her riding lesson still flushed from sun and wind, and Eva thought she looked like a painting, something half-mythical.
"Ina," Eva whispered, holding up the folded parchment.
Seraphina took it, unfolded it, and read with that stillness she reserved for music and dreams. Her dark pale red eyes softened, then lifted to Eva's — mirroring both laughter and the ache of something tender.
"Did you write this for me?" she asked gently.
"Of course," Eva said. "You're the melody."
Seraphina pulled her close, and without ceremony, Eva straddled her waist and wrapped her arms tightly around her neck, nuzzling into her shoulder. This was their language now — words, touch, silence, poems, and the soft brush of hair against skin.
Behind them, unseen — or rather, diplomatically ignored — mére — Aunt Vivienne recorded with discreet amusement from the veranda.
Another clip. Another treasured moment. Another message for her wifey — pretend sister - in - law titled, "Eva: Future Poet Laureate, Clinger - in - Chief."
Eva's life unfolded between these spheres — deep emotional attachments and dazzling intellectual pursuits. Her mornings were still structured with tutors, but she often surpassed them. Her mathematics instructor had quietly admitted to Aunt Vivienne that Eva was beginning to understand concepts he himself had only mastered in university.
Her favorite subject of late was economic theory.
"Because money is just another language," she said once, adjusting her tiny glasses while sipping strawberry milk through a stainless steel straw shaped like a treble clef.
And in that new language, she grew fluent.
Mére — Aunt Vivienne had introduced her to the basics — supply and demand curves, earnings reports, speculative risk, algorithmic modeling — and within a week, Eva was helping identify underpriced mid - cap tech stocks.
Vivienne joked they ought to start a hedge fund called Eva's Intuition.
They didn't. But they did open a second account, just for Eva's chosen investments.
Sixty percent of all gains, Vivienne quietly deposited into a private trust under Eva's name. The other forty percent? That went into Eva's "fun account," where she could buy books, music, embroidery kits, or peculiar mechanical puzzles she found on Japanese stationery sites.
"No one needs to know yet," Vivienne said one evening, her voice gentle, her eyes fond. "It'll be my gift when you're older."
Eva had merely nodded, too focused on refining a chart overlay predicting AI stock divergence to say anything more. But she would remember. She remembered everything.
And yet, for all her mental brilliance, Eva remained very much a little girl. Especially with Seraphina.
She was still happiest in Seraphina's lap, nestled like a kitten, her breath soft against her neck, fingers idly tracing patterns across Seraphina's collarbone. She didn't grow out of it; if anything, she grew deeper into it.
"You're my whole constellation," she whispered once, after waking from a nap in her arms.
Seraphina kissed the crown of her head and said nothing, only cradled her closer.
It was Vivienne who teased most.
"You're going to fuse with her at this rate," she said one afternoon, filming discreetly as Eva sat in Seraphina's lap at the piano bench, their hands overlapping across the keys.
"Let me," Eva said with quiet insistence, correcting Seraphina's finger positioning.
"You're six," Seraphina murmured, amused.
"I'm me," Eva replied. "That's worse."
And it was true. Her attachment to Seraphina had matured from dependency into something richer — neither sisterly nor romantic, not wholly platonic either. It defied simple labels. It was attachment in the purest sense: fierce, soulful, poetic.
Eva had begun composing entire songs for her, not just fragments. One she called Cantus Cordis, the Song of the Heart. It was written in a minor key, with long pauses between phrases — spaces for breathing, or aching, or silence.
A longer version bloomed from her notebook over weeks, growing with her feelings:
"Cantus Cordis" (L••••):
"Inter suspiria et tactus,
tibi cano, flamma mea.
Oculos clausi, sed visio tua manet —
non in luce, sed in corde.
Ubi verba desinunt,
incipit melodia.
Tu, animae lumen,
es finis et initium."
*Between sighs and touches,
I sing to you, my flame.
Eyes closed, but your vision remains —
not in light, but in my heart.
Where words fall short,
the melody begins.
You, light of my soul,
are both the end and the beginning.*
She played it for Seraphina in the small music room one twilight, just before dinner.
Vivienne filmed from the threshold, silent.
The keys spoke what Eva could not always say out loud: her adoration, her awe, her sense that the world began and ended wherever Seraphina was. That somehow, this person — this eleven - year - old dreamer with moonlight in her voice — had become the axis of her six - year - old universe.
Seraphina didn't speak when the piece ended. She only hugged her. Long. Tight. With her eyes closed and one hand in Eva's hair.
"Did I do something wrong?" Eva whispered.
"No," Seraphina said. "You did something right."
Eva didn't know how to explain that sometimes, love wasn't about what happened — it was about what could be lost. That was the undercurrent of all her art now. The fear that one day Seraphina would go where Eva couldn't follow.
The memory of her parents' departure still sat cold in her bones, even if she hadn't been taken away with them. That morning replayed in dreams sometimes — Eva packing her favorite things in silence, thinking she had to say goodbye forever. The relief when she learned she could stay had nearly broken her. She wept not because she was sad, but because she had been saved from sadness.
And she vowed, in the way only a six - year - old prodigy could vow, that she would never waste a second she had with Seraphina.
She told her this once. Whispered it, nose buried under the older girl's jaw.
"I don't want to grow up if you're not there."
Seraphina kissed her hair.
"Then I'll grow up with you," she said softly.
In the mornings, Eva began blending her own teas from scratch, experimenting like a tiny, solemn scientist in the Ainsley's kitchen. Dried hibiscus, jasmine pearls, crushed raspberries, rose petals — measured with the gravitas of a surgeon. Seraphina helped her name them. One was called "Midnight in Ina's Arms." Another: "Whispers on Her Neck."
Mére watched fondly from a corner, recording again, chuckling as she whispered, "This one's called Eva, the Tea Witch," into her phone before sending it to her wife with little heart emojis.
Later that week, Eva brought Seraphina a tiny glass bottle with a cork top.
"This one makes you remember," she said solemnly.
"Remember what?" Seraphina asked.
"Everything good," Eva replied.
They sat on the garden bench one evening, stars rising slow, the scent of rosemary in the air. Vivienne watched from a few feet away, pretending to scroll her phone, but really capturing stills of Eva resting her head in Seraphina's lap.
"I love her too much," Eva murmured. "Is that possible?"
Vivienne smiled to herself but said nothing.
Seraphina brushed hair from Eva's face. "If it is," she said, "then I must be guilty too."