The announcement echoed overhead for the third time.
"Final boarding call for Flight 371 to Rome. Gate B13."
The syllables hung in the air like a verdict.
Elisa Mariani didn't move.
She remained seated on the faux-leather airport bench, legs drawn in tightly, arms wrapped around a worn brown sketchbook like it was the only thing keeping her from falling apart. Her coat, long and black and slightly oversized, swallowed her frame. She hadn't bought it. She hadn't packed it, either. It had been the last thing she pulled from her mother's closet the night before she left.
It still smelled like her—rose oil, old paper, and that odd, earthy musk that came from years spent in dusty libraries and art galleries.
A scent both comforting and suffocating.
The sketchbook under her arms was heavier than it looked. Not just in weight, but in memory.
She glanced down at it briefly, fingers brushing over the frayed corners and dried paint streaks. There were still crumbs of erased pencil stuck between pages. Some sketches were complete masterpieces; others, just rough thumbnails or warped outlines her mother had never had the strength to finish.
Elisa hadn't dared open it in hours.
The Sydney International Airport buzzed in a low, ever-present hum. A symphony of rolling suitcase wheels, half-audible announcements, and the occasional screech of a tired child echoing against polished tile. Screens flickered with arrival and departure times in bold yellow fonts, gates shuffled, people paced, baristas shouted names.
Elisa didn't see any of them.
She sat still. Still as grief.
Her eyes, glassy and unmoving, remained fixed on the boarding gate ahead like it might vanish if she blinked. She hadn't eaten anything since the night before. The half-empty coffee cup on the floor near her feet had long gone cold.
The seat next to her was empty. So was the one on the other side.
No one had sat beside her the entire time.
Maybe they sensed something heavy in the air around her. Or maybe, she thought numbly, she just looked like the kind of person who didn't want to talk.
Because she didn't.
---
Her mother's voice, soft but firm, echoed louder than the speaker systems above.
"Go to Florence. Find true Beauty. You'll know when you see it."
The sentence was etched on the last page of her sketchbook.
Just below an unfinished drawing of the Duomo.
The lines were faint and shaky—drawn during chemo, when holding a pencil had already become an act of defiance. The colors were missing, the detailing incomplete. But the structure was there. The domes and spires like rising prayers. Her mother's obsession with Renaissance architecture had not dulled with her illness.
The final message wasn't written like a dream or a wish.
It had been a command.
A dying wish in ink.
Elisa had spent days staring at that page.
Then weeks.
Then months.
---
"What does that even mean?" she had whispered to herself, curled up on her bed weeks after the funeral.
Beauty wasn't something you found—not like it was a coin on the sidewalk or a museum tucked into an alley. It was studied. Designed. Preserved. Measured in harmony and function, proportion and form. That's what they taught you in architecture school.
But grief was a strange kind of teacher.
It rewrote your rules and upended your syllabi. It stripped away logic and asked questions with no blueprints.
Her classmates had been gearing up for internships in gleaming office buildings, polishing portfolios for firms in New York, London, Singapore.
Elisa hadn't even applied.
She just sat in her room, flipping through her mother's sketches, listening to the echo of a woman who once said, "There are buildings that breathe, Elisa. You just have to listen."
---
A month ago, with shaking fingers and eyes rimmed red, she booked a one-way flight to Rome.
No plan. No itinerary.
Just the sketchbook, her camera, and her mother's last sentence ringing in her ears.
She didn't even know if she'd make it to Florence.
---
Now, minutes before the gate would close, her body moved on its own.
Like waking from a dream underwater, she stood slowly.
Her seat let out a soft sigh as it sprang back into shape.
She reached for her carry-on. Adjusted the sketchbook under her arm like it was armor—because it was. A shield against the unknown. A way to keep her mother close in a world where she no longer existed.
And then her phone buzzed.
She paused, frowning.
A single notification lit up her screen.
____________•••____________
One Plus
You are one plus away from something beautiful.
____________•••____________
She blinked.
What?
There was no app by that name on her phone.
No icon. No installation history.
Nothing.
She tapped the screen.
Nothing opened.
No redirect. No browser page.
Just… the message.
Her stomach knotted. Her heart gave a strange lurch.
A prank? Airport Wi-Fi glitch?
Still, for a breathless second, she glanced around—half expecting someone to walk up to her and explain it all with a sheepish grin.
No one.
Just travelers rushing past. Gate agents shuffling papers. Kids dragging backpacks. Strangers moving on with their lives.
She dismissed the notification.
Too weird. Too random.
Maybe just a bad coincidence.
Still…
She didn't forget it.
---
The gate agent looked up and smiled tiredly as Elisa handed over her boarding pass.
"You're just in time."
Elisa gave a tight, polite nod.
No words.
She couldn't trust her voice.
Her fingers brushed the edge of her coat, the sleeve worn where her mother's bracelet used to snag.
She stepped through the gate tunnel.
Each footstep echoed with soft metallic thuds.
The air felt different—cooler, laced with recycled oxygen and a sharp scent of jet fuel. The tunnel curved forward like the mouth of a cave. Ahead, the plane waited like a sleeping giant.
Elisa's chest tightened.
She thought of the kitchen table back home.
Of late nights spent watching her mother sketch while murmuring about flying buttresses and the mathematics of grace.
Of hot chamomile tea with honey.
Of the laughter that always came after midnight.
Of the last time her mother held her hand.
"Beauty," she once said, fingers moving slowly over a watercolor skyline, "isn't perfect. It's the thing that ruins the silence."
At the time, Elisa didn't understand.
She wasn't sure she understood now.
But the words lingered. Like dust caught in light.
---
She found her seat by the window. Buckled in. Didn't even glance at the in-flight safety card.
The engines roared to life, the runway gliding faster beneath them.
And then—
Weightlessness.
Sydney shrank beneath a veil of clouds.
The ocean stretched endlessly, shimmering in faint twilight.
Elisa clutched the sketchbook to her chest.
Closed her eyes.
And whispered,
"Okay, Mum. I'm going."