第4章 第8節 水辺の家
The House by the Water
They found the house at the far end of a broken .
It was a small building, half-eaten by salt and time.
A nailed to the door announced the coming .
Using Gabriel's brass key, Nora opened the front door.
The key turned, proving that this was the lock he had meant.
Inside, the air was thick with the smell of wood.
Dust covered every surface left behind in the empty rooms.
On a shelf built into the wall sat a small music box.
It was the box shown in her earliest, half-lost memories.
Trembling, Nora lifted the lid and let the turn.
The lullaby began, thin and sweet in the ruined house.
It was the same tune sung to her when she was small.
But something in the felt slightly, strangely wrong.
One note had been changed, placed where it did not belong.
"That is not how the song goes," she said, listening hard.
Her father, standing close, heard the wrong note too.
"Your mother never made mistakes with sound," he said quietly.
The swapped note was not an error but a hidden message.
It marked a place changed on purpose inside the tune.
Counting the notes, Nora reached the strange one and stopped.
It fell on the seventh note, then jumped to the wrong string.
"Seven," she whispered, "and then it points somewhere else."
The music box, restored in her hands, was speaking at last.
Hidden in a child's song was the map to the truth.
But before she could solve it, a slow clap filled the doorway.