The silence of the basement was the kind that pressed against the skin, heavy and unmoving. Rowan had descended the stairs with no clear reason, no official task guiding his steps. He told himself it was nothing, maybe curiosity, maybe instinct. But the truth lived in the tightness inside his chest, the one that hadn't loosened since the meeting where he'd spoken on Nora's behalf. He hadn't asked questions then. He hadn't needed to. But now, that silence felt less like protection and more like denial. He wasn't sure when that shift had happened only that he couldn't ignore it anymore.
The air grew colder the deeper he went. Overhead lights buzzed and flickered as if hesitant to stay on. The archives stretched in long metallic rows, forgotten files tucked into cabinets that hadn't been opened in years. The scent of dust and old paper lingered everywhere, grounding him in the gravity of where he was. He moved without rushing, brushing his fingers along filing cabinets, letting instinct guide him. There were no labels, no order, only the slow murmur of memory and loss in the dim corridors.
Near the far wall, he noticed a shelf that looked disturbed. Folders were messily stacked, some askew like someone had come searching in haste and hadn't bothered to clean up. He crouched, eye catching on a folder partially buried beneath others. The edge was torn. A date, barely visible beneath a fingerprint of time, read: 2012. He pulled it free, brushing off a thin layer of dust. The folder didn't feel different from the others worn, heavy, old. But something in his body stilled the moment he touched it. As if it already knew.
He flipped it open. Most of the content was routine. Printed medical forms, lab reports, standard evaluations. Nothing unusual. Until, without warning, a small photo slipped from between the pages. It drifted to the floor in a silent arc and landed face up.
Rowan bent to retrieve it, and the moment his fingers touched the image, his breath caught.
The child in the photo couldn't have been more than ten. Her smile was uneven, the kind that didn't come from posing but from living. She had dark brown eyes, bright and full of something untouched by fear. Her hair was pulled into a messy ponytail, and the dimple on her right cheek deepened just enough to make her face unforgettable. It wasn't the expression of a patient. It was the look of a girl who believed, truly, that the world around her was safe.
He turned the photo over.
Written on the back in faded blue ink, barely legible:
"Lily Keane Pediatric Oncology 2012."
The air around him seemed to vanish.
He looked at the name again. Then back at the photo. Then again. And that's when it struck him not just like a realization but like a collapse.
She looked like him.
Not vaguely. Not coincidentally. But in a way that turned the walls of his chest to glass. Her jawline. Her cheekbones. The arch of her brows. She looked like someone who shared his blood. The resemblance wasn't imagined it was etched into every line of her young face.
He sank onto the floor, the folder in his lap, the photo still in hand. Around him, the silence thickened. The hum of the lights dimmed. The chill of the concrete pressed through his clothes. But none of it registered.
One memory, long buried, resurfaced.
His father, years ago, had mentioned a case "a complicated pediatric file, handled internally" with no details, no emotion, no name. Rowan had been too young to understand, too disinterested to ask. It had sounded like bureaucracy. Now, it sounded like a confession disguised as paperwork. A girl. A child. A secret. A sister.
Lily.
She wasn't a name in a file. She had existed. She had laughed, breathed, fought, and died. And no one had told him. Not his father. Not Nora. Not anyone. She had been erased with the efficiency of a system built to forget what made it uncomfortable.
And now he was staring at her face, realizing she was his blood.
His sister.
Half-sister. Hidden. Lost.
Grief didn't come like a wave. It came like stone. Heavy and immovable. It settled in his chest and stole the air from his lungs. It wasn't just about Lily. It was about what had been taken. The right to know her. The chance to mourn her. The truth that had been buried along with her small body.
And Nora she had known. She had held that truth and said nothing. Protected it, maybe. Or feared it. He didn't know which was worse.
He stood, the movement slow, as if gravity resisted. The folder trembled in his hand. The photo he folded with care, a reverence born of too many questions and too few answers. He didn't destroy the file. Didn't scream or curse or run. He simply stood in the echoing dark of that archive, staring at the evidence of a life that had been kept from him.
He wondered how many times his father had passed by this room, how many times he had chosen silence over truth. How many people had let Lily become a footnote. A secret.
Rowan didn't cry.
But something inside him fractured a deep, silent splinter that would never fully heal.
And when he finally turned and climbed the stairs back into the hospital's upper floors, the photo of Lily Keane burned in his pocket like a truth that refused to stay hidden.
A name he would never forget.
A sister he never got to know.