The wind carried the scent of salt, pine, and forgotten time.
Alia Reed stepped into the attic flat above Whittaker's Bookshop, her boots creaking against the century-old floorboards. The ceilings sloped like the pages of an old novel bent too long in the sun. Dust clung to the air in soft clouds, catching in the fading light as if the room itself were remembering someone.
She dropped her suitcase by the doorway and exhaled.
This was coastal Maine in October—cold mornings, quieter evenings, and skies that bled grey over the Atlantic like watercolor left out in the rain. She had come here to forget. Or at least to try.
Outside, the harbor town of Eastcliff was winding down. A row of whitewashed houses nestled along cobbled streets; the shops on Main Street—candlelit, ivy-framed—closed one by one. It was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and their hearts out of reach.
The attic apartment had once been the writing quarters of the bookshop's original owner, Mr. Ezra Whittaker, a war veteran turned poet. The landlord had mentioned it casually, along with the comment: "There's a typewriter up there—probably jammed or haunted."
Alia had laughed. At the time.
Now, standing in the dim glow of a single floor lamp, she saw it.
An old Remington typewriter, black and brass, sat atop a writing desk facing the window. Next to it: an envelope, neatly placed. Crisp. Untouched by dust.
She froze.
The envelope was addressed in type:
> "To the Reader Who Hears the Quiet."
Alia's breath caught. Slowly, she opened it.
Inside, one page.
Typed, not handwritten. Words carefully aligned, as though the writer had meant every syllable.
> "The sea is loud, but silence is louder. Welcome, whoever you are."
— M.
She read it again.
It wasn't signed with a full name. Just an "M."
A trick? A leftover note from some previous tenant?
Or the beginning of something else entirely?
Alia didn't know. But for the first time in a long time, something stirred in her chest—not pain, not loneliness... but curiosity.
And that, she thought, might be more dangerous than anything else.