The hall swallowed sound the way deep water swallows light. Rain heard all of it at once — the tuning of a cello two rooms away, a judge's pen scratching her name, the hum in the old stage lights, the heartbeat of the girl waiting behind her.
It rose until it had weight. Her hands went cold on the microphone stand and the room tilted, and somewhere under the noise a smaller, steadier sound found her.
Rain. Just ours. The one Mom sings.
Max was three floors below in the waiting room, but he was inside the melody with her, humming their lullaby the way he had since he was four years old. The hall went quiet — not silent, but ordered, every frequency stepping into line behind that one small tune.
She opened her mouth and the first note left her like something released rather than performed. The judges stopped writing. The stage lights steadied. In the third row, a woman who had not cried at an audition in nineteen years pressed a hand to her mouth.
When Rain finished, nobody moved. And in the silence that followed, she understood that whatever had just happened, it had not been music alone.
Continue reading in The Mysfits — Book One
