Read Chapter 1: The Last Audition

The corridor smelled of dust and old velvet. Élodie Marchand pressed her palm flat against the peeling wallpaper, feeling the faint tremble of the building’s breath around her — a wheeze of pipes, the groan of floorboards settling somewhere above. The Théâtre des Ombres had been dying for decades, and everyone in Paris knew it. Everyone except Élodie, who had begged, borrowed, and bargained her way into this final audition on the strength of a name she no longer had.

She checked her phone. Four minutes left. The door ahead of her was tall and lacquered black, its surface scarred with decades of careless keys and impatient knuckles. Behind it, silence. That was wrong. Auditions were never silent. There should have been a pianist running scales, a stage manager barking cues, the murmur of other singers waiting their turn. But the Théâtre des Ombres had no pianist on staff. No stage manager, either. Just Monsieur Delacroix, the manager, and whatever ambition or desperation had driven him to keep the lights on this long.

Élodie exhaled slowly and pushed the door open.

The auditorium swallowed her whole. It was vast, shadowed, its rows of red velvet seats faded to a dusty salmon under a ceiling of tarnished gold leaf. The chandelier overhead hung dark and skeletal, a fossil of a more glittering age. At the far end, on the wide stage, a single piano stool waited. And beside it, small and stooped, stood Monsieur Delacroix, holding a sheaf of papers that seemed older than the building itself.

“Mademoiselle Marchand,” he said. His voice was thin, precise, like the dry click of a metronome. “You are prompt. That is… a quality.”

“I’m sorry for the circumstances,” she said, stepping down the center aisle. Her heels clicked too loud, and she adjusted her stride to soften them. “I know you normally close auditions in the spring.”

“Normally, I also have a theater that does not leak when it rains.” Delacroix gestured vaguely at the ceiling, where a water stain spread across the fresco like a bruise. “We are improvising. As always.”

He looked at her over the rim of his glasses. His eyes were sharp, birdlike, and they missed nothing — the slight fraying of her coat cuffs, the way her posture shifted from confidence to something more fragile as she approached the stage. Élodie had learned long ago that managers saw everything, so she let them see what she wanted. Now she wanted them to see a professional. She climbed the three steps to the stage and set her bag down with practiced ease.

“I prepared Donna Elvira from *Don Giovanni*,” she said. “And the ‘Casta diva’ from *Norma*, if you’d like something different.”

Delacroix raised an eyebrow. “Different. Yes. That is what I’m told about you — that you sing as if the music matters more than the applause.” He glanced at his notes. “But we have no accompanist tonight. The gentleman we hired fell ill this morning. So I’m afraid you will have to sing unaccompanied, or we can reschedule.”

The word *reschedule* pressed against her chest like a cold hand. She couldn’t afford a reschedule. Her train back to Lyon left at midnight, and her landlady had already given her notice on the sublet. If this failed, there was nothing else. No other theater in Paris would take her. They’d heard the story, the same story that had followed her from Marseille like a stray dog she couldn’t shake.

“I can sing without accompaniment,” she said. “It’s fine.”

Delacroix tilted his head. “Most singers cannot. They need the piano like a crutch.”

“Most singers haven’t spent the last six months performing in the Métro,” she said, and she smiled at him, a real smile, one that reached her exhausted eyes. “I’ve learned to improvise. Just like your theater does.”

For a moment, something flickered in the old man’s face — amusement, or recognition, or perhaps just the fatigue of a man who had heard too many lies from too many hopefuls. He nodded and made a small gesture with his hand.

“Very well. From ‘Casta diva,’ if you please. The opening phrase.”

Élodie closed her eyes. She let the silence of the room settle over her, and she felt the space around her — the high dome of the ceiling, the empty rows of seats, the dark hollows of the wings on either side. She had learned to listen to rooms, not as a singer of sound but as a singer of space, shaping her voice to fill whatever emptiness she stood in. And this room was emptier than most. It drank sound like sand drank water.

She opened her mouth and sang.

The first line of “Casta diva” rose from her chest, pure and cold as moonlight on water. The notes found the walls of the theater, bounced back to her, and she adjusted her resonance on instinct — a fraction more forward, a touch more lift. The phrase hung in the air, unaccompanied, exposed. And then she continued, letting the prayer unfold with a quiet, aching tenderness that she had cultivated through months of singing to strangers who never looked up from their phones.

Halfway through the second verse, she heard it.

A voice. Not in her head. Not in her memory. A voice, real and physical, from somewhere in the dark wings to her left. It was a tenor — warm, flexible, precise — and it was singing harmony beneath her melody. Not the standard harmonies of Bellini’s score. Something older, more ornate, as if the voice were improvising a duet she had never heard but somehow knew.

Élodie nearly faltered. Her chest tightened. She kept singing, because stopping was not an option, but her mind raced. Delacroix had said no accompanist. There was no one else in the building. And yet the voice was there, weaving around hers with an intimate mastery that made her skin prickle.

She sang louder. The voice rose with her, matching her intensity, threading itself through her phrasing until the two lines twisted together into something transcendent — a living, breathing harmony that seemed to lift her off the ground. For a moment, Élodie forgot where she was, forgot why she was there. She was only music, only breath, only the impossible beauty of a duet with a partner she could not see.

Then the phrase ended, and the voice faded into the rafters like smoke.

Silence. The auditorium held its breath. Élodie’s own heartbeat was drumming in her ears. She opened her eyes and looked at Delacroix.

He had gone pale. His hands gripped the sheaf of papers so tightly the edges crumpled.

“Who was that?” he asked. His voice was no longer dry and precise. It was thin, almost frightened.

“I… no one,” Élodie said. “I thought you —”

“I have no one here. No accompanist, no staff, not even a janitor tonight.” Delacroix took a step back from the stage, as if he were retreating from the sound itself. “You sang with someone, Mademoiselle. I heard them. A tenor, I think. Very trained. Distinctly trained. And very… old.”

The word old hung in the air like dust motes. Élodie swallowed, trying to find a rational explanation. “Perhaps a sound from the street? Or a recording somewhere in the building —”

“No recording in this building has worked in fifteen years,” Delacroix said. “And no sound from the street reaches the stage. The walls are two meters thick.”

They stared at each other across the empty auditorium. Élodie felt a cold trickle of sweat run down her spine. She had heard what she had heard. There was no pretending otherwise. But to admit it — to admit she’d been joined by a voice from nowhere — was to admit everything that had gone wrong in Marseille was happening again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what that was. I’ve never…” She hesitated. “I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

It was a lie, and she knew it. But she didn’t know what truth to offer instead.

Delacroix slowly lowered his papers. A long silence passed. Then he let out a breath, long and slow, and something shifted in his expression. The fear drained out of him, replaced by a look she couldn’t quite identify — speculation, perhaps, or curiosity, or the careful calculation of a man who had just found a piece to a puzzle he had been carrying for decades.

“Mademoiselle Marchand,” he said at last. “We have only the understudy role available for *Norma* anyway. The lead — well, the lead was promised to someone else long ago. I cannot offer you more than that. But if you accept, you will have access to the rehearsal rooms, and the stage, in the evenings. Alone.”

Élodie felt her heart stutter. “Understudy,” she repeated. It was not the part she had dreamed of. It was not even close. But it was a door, and doors in Paris had been closing on her for a year.

“And the evenings,” she said. “Why would I need the evenings?”

Delacroix’s eyes flickered toward the wings, where the tenor’s voice had vanished. “Because whatever you sang with tonight,” he said, “will sing with you again. And I want to know what it is.”

He paused, then added, almost to himself: “She’s been silent for a century.”

“She?” Élodie said.

But Delacroix did not answer. He folded his papers, tucked them into his coat, and walked down the aisle without another word. At the door at the back of the auditorium, he paused and looked back at her.

“The theater opens in three weeks. You’ll have dressing room six. In the meantime, Mademoiselle — perhaps you should be careful what you pray for.”

The door clicked shut. The auditorium fell silent again, vast and breathing, and Élodie stood alone on the stage in the dark, listening for the voice she’d just heard.

It did not come back.

But she knew it would.