When Liana returned to her childhood home after twenty years, everything looked smaller except for the silence.
The house stood still, as if holding its breath, waiting for her.
She walked through each room, touching the old furniture, the fading wallpaper, the piano her mother used to play.
But one door, at the end of the hallway, remained closed just like it had always been.
Her mother had told her never to open it.
“Some doors,” she used to say, “keep memories that are safer locked.”
That night, as the wind howled outside and shadows moved across the walls, Liana heard it soft humming… coming from behind that very door.
Her mother had been gone for years.
And yet… the song was the same lullaby she used to sing every night.
Liana reached for the handle. It was cold too cold.
When she turned it, the door creaked open slowly…
And what she saw inside 
She never spoke about it again.
The door opened with a sigh, as if the house itself was exhaling after years of silence.
Dust floated in the air like tiny ghosts.
Inside the room, everything was untouched just as it must have been twenty years ago.
A small bed.
A wooden chair.
A mirror, covered with an old white sheet.
Liana’s heart raced. She could still hear that lullaby, faint but real, as if someone was humming right behind her ear.
Her hands trembled as she lifted the sheet from the mirror.
For a moment, she saw her own reflection.
But then behind her a second figure appeared.
It was her mother.
Exactly as she remembered her.
Smiling softly.
And then, the whisper:
“You shouldn’t have come back, Liana…”
The mirror cracked from the inside slowly, like ice breaking under pressure.
The humming stopped.
When she turned around, the room was empty again.
But on the wall, written in faint letters, was a sentence she had never seen before:
“You promised you’d never open the door.”
Liana didn’t sleep that night.
The walls seemed to breathe; the floorboards whispered her name.
Every few minutes, she thought she heard footsteps… but when she looked, there was nothing.
Only the smell of her mother’s perfume lingering in the hallway.
At dawn, she found herself back inside the forbidden room.
The air was heavy like the room itself remembered.
She touched the cracked mirror. Behind the shattered glass, she noticed something a folded piece of paper trapped inside the frame.
She pulled it out slowly.
It was a letter.
Yellowed, fragile… written in her mother’s handwriting.
“If you are reading this, Liana, then you broke your promise.
The room isn’t cursed. It’s yours.
You were never supposed to remember what happened here that night.
But memories don’t die they hide.
And now that you’ve opened the door… they’ll find you again.”
Her hands shook.
Suddenly, flashes of a stormy night filled her mind a child crying, thunder, her mother screaming her name…
and then darkness.
Liana fell to her knees.
She finally remembered.
The house hadn’t just been her home.
It had been the place where her twin sister… disappeared.
The memories came back like a flood.
Liana saw herself a little girl, crying in the storm, clutching her twin sister’s hand.
Their mother shouting, “Stay inside! Don’t open the window!”
But they had.
Lightning.
Screams.
A flash of glass… and then silence.
Her sister, Lara, had disappeared that night never found, never spoken of again.
Her mother had sealed the room and told Liana to forget.
Now, standing in that same room, Liana whispered through tears,
“Lara… if you’re still here, I’m sorry.”
The air grew cold. The mirror’s cracks glowed faintly like veins of light.
And then… through the reflection, she saw her.
Lara.
The same eyes. The same face. But pale, quiet, and calm.
“You kept my promise,” Lara said softly from the other side of the mirror.
“I stayed… so you could live.”
Liana reached out but the surface was solid glass.
Her sister smiled one last time before fading into light.
When the sun rose, the mirror was whole again.
And the humming… was finally gone.
For the first time in twenty years, the house felt peaceful.
But every time Liana passed that hallway, she still turned her head just to make sure the door was still closed.
