The ballroom fell silent.
Not empty.
Freed.
The portraits slowly stopped rounding their mouths.
Silence finally exhaled.
One by one, as each regained her voice.
Each spoke—
Freely, without tension.
Only L14 remained.
🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀
She turned, not to the narrator, but to Godfather Lim.
His itch had vanished.
His wrinkled fingers no longer reached for it.
Not because there was no remembrance.
But because it lingered.
The plaque beneath L14’s photo loosened.
Fell.
The portrait—
Empty.
The label drifted to the floor, liberated.
Godfather Lim. Still. Wrinkled.
Mouth in a gasp.
🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀
L14 floated confidently to the grand piano.
There was no melody.
None was necessary.
She brushed the polished lid with gentleness.
Love.
The Lim mansion was as dark as it had ever been.
But it was now —
Lighter.
Not brighter.
Lighter.
With its weight now fallen.
Godfather Lim lifted his eyes.
Not to command.
To recognise.
To hear each voice that needed to speak.
I finally understood.
The house had not imprisoned the girls.
It had imprisoned what it had taken from them.
L14 left the ballroom.
Leaving no footsteps.
No goodbye.
Every brass plaque tumbled to the ground as she drifted past.
Naturally.
Freely.
Like the brown leaves floating off a withering tree.
Each portrait remained nameless.
But became whole.
Human.
Feminine.
🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀
Only I remained.
A small brass key rested on the polished, marble floor.
The same key.
Untouched.
It never opened a door.
Memory had been the only lock.
Or revealed any hidden passage.
It merely remembered.
The voices that once locked.
I bent down and reached for it.
Its metal was unexpectedly—
warm.
Each door opened.
Incoming light flooded the corridors.
Dawn no longer needed permission to enter the mansion.
The ballroom doors opened.
In its centre, Godfather Lim.
And L14.
Her red wedding kwa—
Deliberately embroidered.
Tight.
Her eyes, upturned.
Gleaming.
So were his.
My hand closed around the heavy brass key.
She no longer needed it.
🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀❤️🎀
Mirrors of the Mind by Michelle Liew is a collection of psychological and supernatural short stories that explore the quiet unease beneath ordinary moments. These are not tales of spectacle, but of subtle fracture — where memory distorts, silence speaks, and the self is not always singular. In these stories, what is unseen often carries the greatest weight, and what lingers is not what is shown, but what is felt.