The apartment was filled with cardboard boxes. The creak of the floorboards was drowned out by the rustle of the paper Emily carefully wrapped around the dishes. Moving didn't feel like the start of something new - rather, it reminded her of something lost. It was as if she was wrapping up a part of herself with each rolled up scroll.

- Honey, I'm going to get coffee," Jeremy, her husband, said from the hallway.

- Okay," she replied, not taking her eyes off the pile of old frames in the pantry.

The door slammed, and there was silence.

Dust swirled in the sunlight streaming through the window. Emily reached automatically for the box, and her fingers came across a familiar texture that trembled beneath her skin. A wooden frame. The edges cold, but strangely familiar.

She pulled the painting from the depths of the pantry. A gust of wind from the open window lifted a corner of the white protective canvas.

And then she saw it.

The same drawbridge under a full moon. On the left, a man with his hand outstretched, on the right, a woman in a light-colored coat. Their palms almost touch, but the millimeter between them still freezes on the canvas. "Bridge under the moon. Full moon." - so reads the plaque below, once affixed to the bottom edge of the frame.

Emily sat down on the floor, pressing the canvas to her chest as if it might respond with warmth in return. Her breathing became ragged.

- But..." she whispered, "you're gone. Sebastian...

And at that moment, she noticed that there was something written on the back of the painting, down below the edge of the stretcher. Handwriting. His handwriting.

She didn't dare read it. Not yet.

Instead, Emily closed her eyes. And the past, restrained, displaced, denied silence. A memory flashed inside her - warm, bitter, insistent, like a light still trying to reach the edge of darkness.

Somewhere back there, in New York, it had all begun.