Count Mocked the Orphan Girl’s Broken Harp

Count Mocked the Orphan Girl’s Broken Harp Before 200 Guests—But Her Last Note Brought the Dead Duchess’s Black Swan Through the Chapel Window

CHAPTER 1: THE WEIGHT OF THE WIRE

They told me the Sterling Gala was a place where dreams were manufactured for the right price, but for me, it was just another cold, hard floor.

I was seventeen, starving, and my only inheritance was a harp that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck. It was held together by duct tape, prayer, and sheer stubbornness. My fingers were calloused, not from luxury, but from scraping by on the streets, playing for pennies in subway stations where the air smelled like ozone and indifference.

Tonight, I was an intruder. I had slipped past the velvet ropes by carrying the harp like a piece of catering equipment, wearing a dress I’d found in a dumpster behind a high-end vintage shop. It was stained and tattered, but in the dim, amber light of the Sterling estate, it passed for avant-garde.

The air in the ballroom was thick with the scent of expensive perfume, aged scotch, and the kind of casual cruelty that only the ultra-wealthy can afford. Two hundred people were here—the titans of industry, the socialites who made headlines for breakfast, and the people who bought souls for the cost of a charity donation.

Julian Sterling stood at the center of it all. He was the host, the billionaire philanthropist, the man who owned half the city’s skyline. He was tall, his tuxedo fitting him like a second skin, his graying hair perfectly swept back. He held a glass of amber liquid, his eyes scanning the room like a predator in a gilded cage.

He spotted me. Or rather, he spotted the harp.

He walked over, his stride smooth and predatory. The crowd parted like a school of fish avoiding a shark. I stood there, clutching the neck of the instrument, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

“What is this?” he asked, his voice dripping with refined condescension. He didn’t look at me; he looked at the wire-bound mess of wood and string.

“It’s an instrument,” I whispered, my voice cracking.

He laughed, a dry, hollow sound. He reached out and tapped the sounding board with his manicured index finger. A low, ugly thrum echoed through the silence that had suddenly fallen over the room.

“It’s junk,” he corrected. He turned to the crowd, raising his voice so everyone could hear. “Look at this, everyone. We invite the city’s elite, and the caterers let in a street rat with a pile of firewood.”

The laughter was sharp and jagged. It cut through me. I felt the heat rise to my cheeks, the familiar, stinging burn of shame. He leaned in, his face inches from mine, his eyes cold and devoid of any human warmth.

“Give it up, kid,” he sneered, his tone dropping to a whisper meant only for me. “You’re ruining the aesthetic. You’re nothing but a distraction. Go back to the gutter where you belong.”

He signaled to a security guard, a massive man with a headset, who began to move toward me.

I looked at the faces around me. Not a single person stepped forward. Not a single person offered a kind word. They were all waiting to see the spectacle of my expulsion.

I looked at the harp. I looked at the wire binding the frame. My mother had died holding this instrument, and she had told me it wasn’t just wood. She had told me it was a bridge.

“I won’t leave,” I said, my voice suddenly steady. The security guard froze, surprised by the defiance.

Julian Sterling scoffed, shaking his head. “You have thirty seconds before I have you thrown into the street, literally.”

I sat down on the velvet stool. It was the moment of no return. I didn’t care about the money. I didn’t care about the ego. I reached out, my trembling fingers finding the strings. They were cold, biting into my skin, but I pulled them taut.

I took a breath. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t play for them. I didn’t play for Julian.

I played for the ghosts.

CHAPTER 2: THE SYMPHONY OF SHADOWS

The first note didn’t sound like music. It sounded like a sob.

My finger, raw and calloused, caught the high-tension steel string of the lowest octave. The sound resonated through the wooden frame of the harp, vibrating against my chest. In a normal setting, it would have been a mistake—a clumsy, amateur pluck in a room full of people who paid thousands for the perfect, sterile acoustics of an orchestra.

But here, in the Sterling estate, the air was different. It felt charged, heavy, and static-filled, like the moments right before a lightning strike.

When that note hung in the air, the collective laughter of the two hundred guests didn’t just stop; it died. It withered away as if someone had sucked the oxygen right out of the room.

Julian Sterling, who had been sneering just seconds ago, froze. His wine glass, half-raised to his lips, halted. He looked at me, not with contempt anymore, but with a strange, fleeting flicker of confusion.

I didn’t care about him. I didn’t care about the security guard who was still hovering a few feet away, his hand twitching toward his belt.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t see the opulent, gilded ballroom anymore. I saw the attic where my mother had kept this harp. I saw the dust motes dancing in the shaft of pale, winter light. I remembered her trembling hands, her fingers tracing the wood, teaching me that music wasn’t about pleasing the ears—it was about waking the soul.

I plucked the next string. A low, haunting melody began to coil through the ballroom.

It wasn’t a song anyone there had ever heard. It wasn’t classical. It was something older. It was a rhythm of the earth—of wind through dead leaves, of water rushing against stone, of the long, lonely silence that follows a funeral.

“Stop that,” Julian muttered. His voice was too loud in the sudden vacuum of sound. “I said stop it.”

I didn’t open my eyes. I let my fingers move, faster now, dancing across the broken, taped-up strings. The harp frame, held together by nothing but willpower and duct tape, didn’t creak. It sang. The sound seemed to grow, amplifying itself, bouncing off the vaulted ceilings and marble floors until it felt like the walls themselves were humming.

People began to shift. The socialites, so carefully curated and polished, began to look uncomfortable. They were looking at each other, their faces etched with a dawning, irrational unease. The music was invasive. It was digging into the memories they buried under expensive scotch and designer clothes.

“Security!” Julian barked, his face flushing. He was losing control of the room, and he hated it more than anything. “Get her out of here! Now!”

The guard stepped forward, reaching out a meaty hand to grab my shoulder.

But he didn’t reach me.

Just as his fingers were inches from my skin, a sound ripped through the air—a sound so sharp, so piercing, that the guard recoiled as if he’d been struck by physical force. It wasn’t me. It was the room.

The heavy, floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window behind me, which depicted the Sterling family crest in garish blues and golds, groaned.

It wasn’t a natural sound. It was the sound of lead and glass surrendering to a frequency they were never meant to withstand.

“What is that?” someone whispered from the crowd.

“The wind,” another replied, but their voice trembled. “It’s not windy outside.”

I played on. I could feel the energy in the room coalescing around me, a vortex of cold air spinning against the stifling heat of the gala. My fingers were bleeding now, the strings cutting into my skin, but I didn’t feel it. I felt the music flowing through me, a conduit for something that had been waiting a very, very long time.

Julian took a step back, his polished shoes clicking sharply on the floor. He looked at the window, then back at me, his eyes wide with a sudden, dawning terror. “She’s doing something,” he whispered. “How is she doing that?”

He looked at me as if I were a monster. And maybe, in that moment, I was.

The music intensified. It grew into a cacophony of sound that felt like a storm trapped in a box. The chandelier above us began to sway, the crystal droplets clinking against each other like warning bells.

People were moving back now, pushing against one another, their champagne flutes discarded on the floor, forgotten. The panic was quiet, almost reverent. They were watching the glass.

The window was vibrating so violently that the individual panes of glass were rattling in their lead frames. The colors—the blues, the golds, the deep, blood-red of the Sterling crest—began to blur.

“Stop!” Julian screamed at me, lunging forward, his composure completely shattered. He looked like a cornered animal. “I’ll have you arrested! I’ll destroy you! Stop the music!”

I didn’t stop. I opened my eyes.

I looked at him, and for the first time, he saw me. He didn’t see the street rat. He didn’t see the “aesthetic” he was so worried about. He saw the fire in my eyes, the cold, hard, unyielding resolve of someone who had nothing left to lose.

I struck the final, heavy chord of the sequence.

It wasn’t a sound. It was a release.

At that exact second, the sound of glass shattering wasn’t just a noise—it was an explosion.

The stained glass didn’t just break; it detonated inward, showering the ballroom in a glittering, lethal rain of colors. The security guard hit the deck, covering his head. Women screamed. The men stood paralyzed.

And then, through the gaping, jagged hole of the window, against the backdrop of the dark, stormy night, something descended.

It was large. It was impossibly dark. It looked like a tear in the fabric of the night sky itself.

It didn’t fly in; it plummeted, wings spread wide, a silhouette of black velvet and malice.

It was a swan. But not a creature of the park pond. This bird was monstrous, its wingspan easily five feet across, its feathers slick with rain and darkness, its eyes burning with a strange, luminescent intensity that felt ancient and wrong.

It slammed into the floor of the ballroom, its talons skidding across the polished marble, sending shards of glass sliding in every direction.

Silence descended on the room. Total, absolute, suffocating silence.

The swan stood, its long, elegant neck arching, its obsidian eyes scanning the room of frozen, terrified elite. It didn’t look at the crowd. It didn’t look at the shattered glass.

It looked at me.

And behind me, the last note of my song hung in the air, vibrating, waiting for the world to decide what it had just unleashed.

Julian Sterling was on his knees, his hands trembling, staring at the black bird. He looked like he had seen a ghost. And in the depths of his terrified eyes, I saw the truth—he knew exactly what this was. He knew whose swan this had been.

The dead Duchess’s swan had come home. And it had brought the secrets of the Sterling fortune with it.

I stood up, the harp still in my arms, my chest heaving, the blood from my fingers dripping onto the velvet stool. The crowd was a sea of pale, terrified faces.

The bird took a step toward me.

“Don’t move,” someone whispered in the back.

But I did. I stepped toward it.

The air in the room grew deathly cold. The temperature plummeted so fast that I could see my own breath misting in front of my face. The socialites began to shiver, but nobody left. Nobody could leave. They were transfixed, held captive by the impossible reality of the moment.

The black swan let out a hiss—not the sound of a bird, but a low, guttural vibration that seemed to come from beneath the floorboards. It walked toward me with a slow, deliberate grace, its feathers shedding water onto the expensive rug, leaving a trail of dark, wet footprints.

Julian scrambled back, his tuxedo jacket torn, his hair disheveled. “This isn’t… this isn’t possible,” he stammered. “She’s dead. She’s been dead for twenty years!”

His words confirmed it. The swan wasn’t just a bird. It was a message. A reckoning.

I looked at the creature. Up close, I could see things in its eyes—reflections of things that weren’t in the room. A garden, a grave, a woman in a long, dark dress standing on a terrace, holding a heart in her hands.

The bird stopped inches from my feet. It tilted its head, and for a terrifying second, it felt like it was reading my mind, judging my worth.

I reached out my hand.

The crowd gasped in unison. “Don’t touch it!” someone yelled, but the warning sounded hollow, a feeble attempt to exert control over a situation that had clearly spiraled into the supernatural.

My hand hovered over its wet, dark feathers. They were freezing, like touching ice.

The bird didn’t bite. It didn’t recoil. It leaned into my touch, a soft, purring sound emanating from its throat.

The room erupted into chaos.

It wasn’t a loud chaos. It was a frantic, scrambling madness. People started pushing toward the exits, tripping over each other, their veneer of sophistication stripping away to reveal the raw, cowardly panic underneath. Guards tried to rally, but their weapons felt useless against the sheer impossibility of the swan.

Julian was still on the floor, watching the swan. His eyes were watering, his face a mask of regret and hidden, dark knowledge. He looked at me, and I saw a flash of something else—fear, yes, but also a strange, desperate envy.

“You,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “You have her gift.”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I was looking at the swan, and I was seeing the truth of what had happened to my mother. The answers were all here, hidden in the black feathers of this creature.

The music was gone, but the resonance remained.

I took a deep breath, the air tasting of ozone and wet feathers. I turned to look at the room full of people who had mocked me, who had wanted to throw me out, who had wanted to silence me.

They were all looking at me now. They weren’t looking at the billionaire. They were looking at the girl with the broken harp and the black swan.

The power dynamic of the entire room had shifted. The empire of the Sterlings, built on money and cruelty, had just been breached by something that money couldn’t buy and cruelty couldn’t defeat.

I walked toward the center of the room, the swan following at my heels like a loyal shadow. Every step I took felt like a declaration of war.

“Who else wants me to leave?” I asked.

My voice was quiet, but in that massive, cavernous ballroom, it sounded like a thunderclap.

Nobody answered. Nobody moved.

Julian Sterling looked at the swan, then at me, and he finally understood. He hadn’t just insulted a homeless girl. He had invited the past into his house, and it had brought its own guest.

And the night was only just beginning.

CHAPTER 3: THE INHERITANCE OF THE VOID

The silence that followed the swan’s arrival was heavier than the explosion of glass. It wasn’t just a lack of noise; it was a physical weight, a suffocating blanket of static that pressed against our chests.

Two hundred of the city’s most influential people stood frozen in the wreckage of their own high-society night. They looked like statues—some with mouths agape, others with hands hovering over their faces, hiding from the sight of the impossible.

And there I stood, a girl in a dumpster-dive dress, cradling a broken, wire-bound instrument, with a five-foot-tall black swan standing at my side like a sentinel from hell.

Julian Sterling was still on his knees, his expensive tuxedo now dusted with pulverized safety glass. He was trembling. Not the shake of a man who is merely afraid, but the palsy of a man who has looked into the abyss and realized the abyss was looking back at him.

“You have no idea what you’ve brought here,” he rasped, his voice sounding thin, fragile, like dry parchment. He didn’t look at the crowd. He looked at the swan.

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have to. The swan turned its long, elegant neck toward him and let out a soft, rhythmic hiss. It was the sound of a snake, but deeper, reverberating through the floorboards.

The swan stepped toward Julian.

He scrambled back, his heels scraping against the marble, his eyes wide with a frantic, animal terror. “Keep it away from me,” he whispered, not to me, but to the creature itself. “I didn’t mean for it to end this way. I was only following the will.”

The will.

The word hung in the air like smoke. My mother had mentioned a will—a dying wish—a thousand times when she was delirious with fever in the attic. She had always told me, “Evelyn, when the music plays, the truth will sign its name.”

I had thought she was delusional. Now, watching the billionaire wither under the gaze of a bird, I realized she was a prophet.

“What will?” I asked, my voice cutting through the silence. It was the first time I’d spoken since the music stopped.

Julian’s gaze darted to me, then back to the swan. He realized he was trapped. The room was full of witnesses, all of them armed with smartphones, all of them broadcasting this nightmare to the world. He couldn’t kill me. He couldn’t touch me.

“The Duchess’s Will,” he spat the words out like poison. “She didn’t leave her estate to the city. She didn’t leave it to the board. She left it to the music. To the lineage of the one who could sing the song of the black swan.”

He looked at my harp—that pathetic, duct-taped, broken thing.

“I thought it was a myth. A bedtime story for the lower class to keep them hoping for a miracle that would never come.” He laughed, a jagged, broken sound. “But you… you found it.”

The swan nudged my hand with its beak. The touch was icy, sending a shiver through my arm that rattled my teeth. It wanted me to move. It was pulling me, not physically, but with a psychic gravity that I couldn’t resist.

I turned away from Julian and began to walk. The crowd parted. People literally scrambled over each other to clear a path, afraid that if they stood too close to me, or to the bird, they would be dragged into whatever madness was unfolding.

The swan walked beside me. Its webbed feet slapped against the marble with a wet, heavy sound that echoed in the vaulted ceiling.

We didn’t head for the exit. We headed for the dais—the stage where the orchestra had been playing before I walked in. Behind the heavy velvet curtains, there was a private study, the place where Julian Sterling did his business, where he signed the contracts that ruined lives.

“Stop!” Julian screamed, scrambling to his feet, ignoring the glass cutting into his palms. “You can’t go in there! Security! Stop her!”

The security guards moved. They were professionals. They were trained to handle threats, to neutralize danger. They rushed forward, batons drawn, boots pounding the floor.

But they didn’t reach us.

As they got within ten feet, the swan spread its wings. They didn’t just flap; they expanded, blocking out the light from the chandeliers, creating a wall of midnight-black feathers that seemed to absorb the very air around us.

A shockwave of sound—a low, bass-heavy thrum from the harp—ripped through the room. It was an involuntary reaction. My fingers, resting on the strings, played a chord I didn’t command.

The guards were thrown back as if hit by a physical wall of force. They sprawled across the floor, their weapons sliding away.

The crowd didn’t cheer. They didn’t scream. They just watched, paralyzed by the sheer, raw impossibility of it all.

I reached the study door. It was locked, of course. A heavy, reinforced mahogany door with a biometric scanner.

The swan stopped. It looked at the scanner, then at me. It tilted its head.

I looked at the harp. The wood was warm now, buzzing with a life of its own. I brought my hand to the scanner. I didn’t know why, but I felt a pull—a memory that wasn’t mine, but was hidden in the marrow of my bones.

I touched the panel.

The scanner didn’t turn red. It turned white—a blinding, clean, pure light.

Click.

The door swung open.

I stepped into the room. It smelled of aged leather, cigar smoke, and secrets. Julian Sterling stumbled in behind me, breathless, his face pale, his composure entirely gone.

“How?” he gasped. “That lock… it’s keyed to my DNA. My lineage. The Sterling bloodline.”

I looked at the swan. It had entered the room with me, its eyes glowing with that same, haunting light. It walked over to a massive, oil-painted portrait of a woman—the Duchess—hanging above the fireplace.

It pecked at the canvas. Not at the paint, but at the frame.

“Don’t,” Julian whispered, falling into a velvet armchair, covering his face with his hands. “Don’t tear it open.”

But it was too late.

The swan hooked its beak into the ornate gold carving and pulled. With a sound of splintering wood, a hidden compartment popped open.

Inside wasn’t money. It wasn’t jewelry.

It was a scroll—an ancient, yellowed piece of parchment, sealed with black wax. And beneath it, a smaller, delicate object: a tuning key made of obsidian, shaped like a swan’s neck.

I reached out and took the key. The moment it touched my skin, a flash of images hit me.

A garden in the rain. A woman in a silk dress, holding a baby—my mother. A secret agreement signed in blood and music. The truth about the Sterling fortune.

It wasn’t their fortune. It was ours.

My mother hadn’t been a beggar. She had been the rightful heir, the keeper of the melody that sustained this estate. Julian Sterling hadn’t built this empire; he had stolen it, and he had spent twenty years trying to silence the music that would prove it.

I turned to Julian. He was shivering, his eyes tracking the tuning key in my hand.

“You knew,” I said, my voice cold and hard, a stranger’s voice. “You knew she was still alive. You knew where we were.”

He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t. He looked up at me, and for a moment, the billionaire, the titan of industry, looked like a broken child. “I had to,” he whimpered. “The money… the power… I couldn’t let the music start again. If the song was played, the estate would revert to the bloodline. It would all be gone.”

“It is gone,” I said.

I looked at the harp in my hand. The broken, taped-up mess of wires. It wasn’t broken. It was just waiting for the key.

I knelt down, the swan standing guard beside me, its presence a cold, dark anchor in the room. I inserted the obsidian key into the harp.

The instrument groaned, the wood expanding, the tape peeling away as if burned by an invisible fire. The wires tightened, humming with a frequency that vibrated in the very floorboards of the mansion.

Julian screamed—not a sound of anger, but a sound of total, unadulterated loss. “No! You’ll destroy us all!”

“No,” I corrected, looking him straight in the eyes. “Just you.”

I began to play. And this time, I didn’t need to try. The music flowed through me, a torrent of vengeance and truth, a song that would be heard not just in this room, but by everyone outside who was waiting for the world to change.

The walls began to crack. Not with the sound of destruction, but with the sound of a prison breaking open.

The Sterling estate was coming down. And I was the one who had unleashed the wrecking ball.

The livestream in the ballroom was still running. I knew that. I knew the world was watching. And I knew that by the time I finished this song, the billionaire would be nothing, and I would be the architect of his ruin.

I played, and the swan began to sing.

It wasn’t a bird’s call. It was a human voice—my mother’s voice—rising from the throat of the beast, harmonizing with the harp, telling the truth to the world in a melody that no one would ever forget.

The collapse of the Sterlings had begun. And it was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

CHAPTER 4: THE FINAL NOTE AND THE NEW DAWN

The melody didn’t just play; it unraveled the house.

As I drew the obsidian tuning key across the newly taut strings of the harp, the resonance was no longer just sound. It was a wave of truth. The walls of the Sterling study, reinforced with steel and secrets, began to vibrate, and the air filled with a shimmering, golden dust—the remnants of the spells or perhaps the sheer, concentrated history of the mansion being shaken loose.

Julian Sterling was no longer a billionaire. He was a man drowning in the wake of his own crimes. He slumped against the desk, watching as the screens in the room—monitors that controlled the empire he had built on theft and deception—flickered. The security feeds, the financial ledgers, the private correspondence—it was all being overwritten by the music.

The livestream from the ballroom was still active. I knew, with the clarity of a clairvoyant, that the entire world was watching this. Millions of people were tuned into the feed of the “homeless girl with the harp.” And they were watching the screens in the study change. The encrypted files, the stolen assets, the evidence of my mother’s erasure—it was all being projected onto the walls of the gala for everyone to see.

The swan, my silent, terrifying companion, moved toward Julian. It didn’t attack him. It simply stood before him, its obsidian eyes reflecting the chaotic data flashing on the walls. It was the witness. It was the judge.

“Stop it,” Julian whimpered, clutching his head. “I didn’t steal it! It was an investment! It was a business decision!”

“It was a life,” I said. My voice was calm, anchored by the music that still hummed in the air, a low, powerful drone that felt like the heartbeat of the estate.

I stopped playing for a moment, the silence rushing back in to fill the room, sharper and colder than before. I walked toward the window that looked out over the sprawling, manicured grounds of the estate. The gardens, the fountains, the gatehouse—it was all a cage.

“My mother died in a room no bigger than a closet,” I told him, looking out at the sprawling lawn. “She died holding this harp, singing to the walls because she had nowhere else to turn. You didn’t just take her money, Julian. You took her voice.”

I turned back to him. The tuning key was still in my hand. It felt cold, heavy with a purpose that transcended the metal and stone of this house.

“The song isn’t over,” I said.

I raised the harp. I didn’t just pluck the strings; I struck them with the intensity of a storm.

The sound shattered the last of the study’s defenses. The heavy mahogany desk split down the middle. The portrait of the Duchess above the fireplace dissolved into ash, revealing a safe that had been hidden behind it for twenty years. The door to the safe groaned and swung open, spilling its contents onto the floor—documents, deeds, a confession written in a shaky, desperate hand.

Julian’s confession.

The crowd in the ballroom had been silent, but now, a low murmur began to rise—the sound of realization. They were seeing the documents on the big screens. They were reading the truth. The Sterling empire was not built on innovation or industry. It was built on the systematic destruction of my mother’s legacy.

Julian crawled toward the safe, his hands clawing at the documents, but the swan stepped in his path. It didn’t strike; it just spread its wings, a wall of black feathers that Julian couldn’t pass. He stopped, defeated, his face buried in his hands as the reality of his ruin crashed down on him.

Outside, the storm had broken. The clouds parted to reveal a sky so clear it looked like glass, and the moonlight flooded into the room, illuminating the swan, the ruined study, and the girl who had walked in with nothing and was leaving with everything.

I didn’t take the money. I didn’t want the estate.

I picked up the documents from the floor. They weren’t just papers; they were the key to dismantling the power that had held this city hostage for two decades.

The security guards, who had been trying to breach the study, were frozen at the door, their expressions shifting from aggression to awe. They had seen the truth, too. They weren’t fighting for a billionaire anymore; they were watching a reckoning.

I walked out of the study, the swan trailing behind me, its gait slow and regal. I walked through the ballroom, through the crowd of the wealthy and the powerful who were now nothing more than ghosts in the wreckage of a lie.

I didn’t stop to look at Julian again. He was finished. The world was watching his empire burn, and the music was still playing, faint and beautiful, trailing behind me like a cloak.

I pushed open the massive double doors of the mansion and stepped out into the night air. The city lights twinkled in the distance, a vast, indifferent ocean of people.

I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I would do with the papers in my hand. But for the first time in my life, the harp was light. The burden was gone.

The swan stopped at the edge of the terrace. It looked at me, its eyes glowing with a soft, fading light. It leaned forward, pressing its beak against my cheek—a final, silent farewell.

Then, with a powerful beat of its wings, it took off into the night sky, its silhouette swallowed by the stars.

I stood there, the harp in my arms, the cool night air brushing against my face. The music had stopped, but the melody remained, etched into the air, into the city, into the history of the night.

I was seventeen. I was homeless. I was a girl with a broken harp.

But I was also the girl who brought down a titan with a single note.

And as I walked down the long, winding driveway of the Sterling estate, leaving the ruins behind me, I knew that the song was just beginning. The future wasn’t something I had to wait for anymore. It was something I was going to write, one note at a time.

The dawn was coming. And this time, it belonged to me.