But the next morning, she heard it.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. She sat at the dead piano, lifted the tuning fork, struck it against her knee, and touched it to the highest string. The C hummed through the wood like a heartbeat. Then, one by one, she tuned every string. It took her until dawn. Her fingers bled in two places. But when she pressed down the first chord—a soft, hesitant G major—the piano wept.
“You’re not running from the world, Mya. You’re running from your own echo. Play the piano. Even broken things deserve a song.”
Mya Lennon had a rule: never stay in one place longer than the wildflowers took to bloom. That gave her about three months per town—just enough time to fall in love with a view, a coffee shop, a stranger’s smile, and then leave before any of it could love her back.