Chapter 4

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 Chapter 4: Of Names and Echoes


They kept meeting.

Ella would perform, and Elias would listen—devoted, silent, enraptured. Afterward, they’d talk. She was curious about him in the way you might be about a haunting: drawn, unsure why.

“You speak like a man from another era,” she teased one night.

He smiled softly. “Maybe I am.”

As the days blurred into soft evenings and rain-dappled streets, their connection deepened. Ella began to share her art—paintings, dreams, songs—and Elias saw something that made his breath catch:

The artwork depicts a beautiful garden. Their garden.

Every detail was identical to the one outside his home in 1871: the iron gate, the wild violets, the way the light fell through the hedges. She had never been there. Yet somehow, she remembered.

“It came to me in a dream,” she said. “A man was waiting beyond the gate. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was waiting for me.”

Elias reached for her hand then—trembling not from fear, but from wonder.

Could time be more than linear? Could love imprint across lives?

He dared not call her Eleanor. Not yet.

But when she laughed, when she brushed a curl behind her ear, when she leaned in just so—he felt it.

She was her.

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