The Quietest Flat On The Block!

Then Marcus came to us with a cloth bundle. Inside was a battered violin. A note tucked inside the case read:

“Find your own voice.”

He took it upstairs.

And the next morning—4 a.m.—the corridor filled with sound. Not stomps or slams, but music. Soft, deliberate notes from that old violin, painting silence with melancholy.

We knocked. He opened the door.

“Thought I’d try,” he said.

“You play?” we asked.

“She told me I should,” he replied, gesturing to a photo on his shelf: a young Mrs. Dragu beside a boy with a violin. The birthmark unmistakable.

“She gave me that before she passed,” Marcus said. “Told me to understand love before it disappears.”

She had known. She wasn’t just making noise—she was composing grief, echoing loss, rehearsing love that hadn’t returned.

Soon after, Marcus announced he was leaving.

“Why now?” we asked.

He smiled. “I found what I came for.”

He left with a backpack and a violin.

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