🔴 THAT STRANGE MUSIC BOX PLAYED THE SONG FROM OUR WEDDING. I SMASHED IT.
I saw it sitting there on the dusty shelf, its porcelain chipped and faded like our love. And the smell of Grandma’s old perfume, all sickly sweet, flooded my senses.
He always said he hated that song, “At Last,” but now, here was proof, tucked away in the attic like a forgotten sin. “What is this supposed to mean, David?” I screamed into the empty house.
My hands trembled as I picked it up, the melody tinkling, tinny, and then a wave of nausea washed over me. I hurled the damn thing against the wall. Porcelain shards scattered like fallen snowflakes.
Then I saw it, a tiny compartment I’d never noticed before, hidden beneath the mechanism — with a tiny slip of paper inside.
👇 Full story continued in the comments…
Carefully, my hands still trembling, I sifted through the scattered porcelain teeth of the music box and the springy guts of its mechanism. There, lodged beneath a tiny metal cog, was the paper. It was folded tight, yellowed with age, and felt brittle in my fingers.
I unfolded it gently, my breath catching in my throat, the faint scent of Grandma’s perfume mixing with the dust and the sharp tang of my own anger. Written in familiar handwriting, the elegant loops David used only for cards and special notes, were just a few lines:
*For my darling, someday.*
*I know I always said I hated this song.*
*I didn’t. Not really.*
*It was the sound of coming home when I was lost.*
*And then it became the sound of finding you.*
*Keep it safe. It’s ours.*
*Love, D.*
My vision blurred. The anger that had consumed me moments before drained away, leaving behind a vast, aching emptiness and a stinging regret so sharp it made me gasp. “He… he didn’t hate it?” I whispered, the sound swallowed by the silent house.
It wasn’t a forgotten sin; it was a buried treasure. A secret tenderness I had never known existed, hidden away like the compartment itself. He didn’t hate our song; he had loved it before he even met me, a beacon in his own darkness, and then it had simply become *more*. And he had intended to give it to me, ‘someday’. Why someday? Why hidden? Why did he pretend?
I sank to my knees amidst the shards, the slip of paper clutched in my hand, the tinny echo of “At Last” now silent forever in the broken pieces around me. The music box wasn’t proof of a lie or a betrayal; it was proof of a secret, fragile truth I had just destroyed. And the silence of the house was no longer accusatory, but simply heavy with the weight of my own shattered understanding.