"Father," she finally couldn’t help but ask, her low voice filled with irrepressible anticipation, "the surprise... where is it?"
Murphy didn’t answer imdiately. He just quietly gazed at the starry sky, as if he were waiting for sothing.
Aurora walked to her daughter’s side and gently wrapped an arm around her shoulder, saying warmly, "Don’t be anxious, Eleanor. If it’s a surprise, you have to have a little patience."
Just then, Murphy slowly began to speak, his voice ringing out with exceptional clarity and a profound depth across the spacious Observatory:
"This surprise, perhaps... is related to the person you’ve always missed."
Eleanor’s body stiffened slightly.
The person she’d always missed...
Her dark eyes flew wide. She whirled to face her father, then quickly glanced at her mother, her gaze filled with utter disbelief and a dawning spark of hope.
Aurora t her daughter’s suddenly fervent gaze and nodded gently, confirming Murphy’s words. But her eyes also held a complex, indescribable emotion.
"Mom..." Eleanor’s voice was faint and trembling. "Is it... Mom? She... she’s back?"
Her heart hamred like a drum, threatening to burst from her chest.
Ten years. It had been ten whole years since the mother who had held her so gently, who had told her stories of the starry sky, had quietly departed one afternoon with her Aunt Othilia, leaving behind nothing but a cold puppet...
’Could it be...?’
The next mont, however, she forced herself to calm down.
’No, that’s not right.’
’There’s no one else here. My Spiritual Power isn’t sensing anything.’
Her gaze swept over the empty platform once more. The light of hope in her eyes quickly dimd, replaced by an even deeper disappointnt.
She lowered her head, her lips pressed into a tight line.
"Mom..." Her voice was barely audible, tinged with an undisguised bitterness. "Is it sothing else Mom left behind?"
Murphy watched his daughter ride the sudden wave of hope and disappointnt, and he fell silent for a mont.
Just then, a voice erged from a corner on the inner side of the platform, one shrouded in the shadow of a pillar.
The voice was gentle and clear:
"Eleanor."
Just her na.
Eleanor’s body trembled violently, as if she had been struck by an electric current.
She snapped her head up, her dark eyes locked on the direction the voice had co from.
’That voice... The way it called my na...’
It overlapped with the gentle voice from her mories—a voice that was faint, yet so profoundly ingrained.
’No, it wasn’t just the stiff, simulated voice of the puppet from my mories.’
This voice held an indescribable vitality.
A slender figure slowly erged from the shadows, stepping into the cool moonlight.
A deep purple, off-the-shoulder velvet gown, its hem flowing like the night.
Thick, black hair cascaded down like a waterfall, a few strands brushing against her smooth shoulders and neck.
Her face was so exquisite it seed dreamlike. She bore a strong resemblance to Eleanor, looking exactly as she did in Eleanor’s mory of the day she left.
Especially her eyes. Gazing at Eleanor now, those irises, as dark as midnight, were no longer the empty voids of a puppet but were brimming with a myriad of complex emotions.
Margaret—or rather, the consciousness of the true Margaret now controlling this puppet—ca to a stop in the moonlight. She gazed at her daughter, now a graceful young woman standing just a few steps away. She looked at the face so much like her own, and at the tears that suddenly welled in her daughter’s eyes—a mixture of shock, confusion, longing, and disbelief.
Her lips trembled slightly, as if a thousand words were stuck in her throat.
Finally, she took a small step forward and extended a slightly trembling hand, her voice even softer than before:
"Eleanor... my daughter... Happy birthday."
Those two words, "my daughter," completely shattered the last of Eleanor’s hesitation and her defenses.
Ten years of accumulated longing, sorrow, and desire burst forth in that instant, like a flood crashing through a dam.
"Mom—!"
Unable to control herself any longer, she let out a choked sob and lunged forward. She threw her arms around the purple figure that seed almost unreal in the moonlight, burying her face in the crook of her mother’s neck and breathing in a scent both familiar and strange. Her slender shoulders trembled uncontrollably.
The mont her daughter hugged her tightly, Margaret’s body also began to tremble violently.
She closed her eyes as two silent tears stread down her pale cheeks, dripping onto Eleanor’s dark hair.
She raised her arms and hugged her daughter back with an almost desperate tightness, as if trying to pour ten years of missed ti into that single embrace.
Murphy quietly watched the mother and daughter embracing under the moonlight for a long ti.
Then, he turned his wheelchair toward Aurora and said in a low voice:
"Let’s leave them be."
Aurora pulled her gaze away from the embracing pair and looked at Murphy.
Her eyes were filled with complex emotions—concern, understanding, and a faint, inexpressible wistfulness.
But she asked nothing. She simply nodded gently, walked behind the wheelchair, and placed her hands on the push handles.
"Mm," she answered softly.
The wheelchair turned slowly, its wheels making a soft sound as they rolled across the smooth stone floor toward the spiral staircase they had co up.
Annabelle had already retreated silently to the top of the stairs. She now bowed slightly to let them pass, then followed quietly behind.
Their figures gradually vanished into the shadows at the entrance to the Observatory, leaving the tranquil, moon-drenched platform to the mother and daughter, reunited after a long separation.
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