🩶 Backstory: The Secret Beneath Vale Manor
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🔮 The Grandmother: Vera Vale
Born in 1903, Vera Vale was a luminous presence in the silent film era—enigmatic, elegant, untouchable. She rose to fame with her expressive eyes, sharp wit, and refusal to conform to industry expectations. But beneath the surface, Vera lived a life in fragments.
In 1928, at the peak of her fame, she met Juliette Lang, a French-American stage actress known for her radical performances and sapphic poetry. Their connection was instantaneous, intense, and dangerous. In an era where women couldn’t live freely, they hid their love behind closed doors—inside the very walls of Vale Manor, a secluded estate Vera purchased far from the public eye.
They built a life in secret. Late-night dances. Handwritten letters. Love films they made for each other in private—never meant for public view.
But their love became known.
Not to the world.
To Luca Fontaine—a rising male actor, Vera’s industry match and beard. Vera never loved him. But the studios insisted on a public engagement.
When Vera ended the arrangement, Luca retaliated—not with violence, but power. He leaked scandalous whispers, sabotaged Juliette’s theatre career, and made sure her name was blacklisted in every major city.
Heartbroken, Juliette vanished. Her body was never found. Only a telegram remained, never sent:
“My love, I will wait in the walls. I will wait until you say my name.”
Vera was never the same. She retired from film at 30. Lived alone in the manor until her disappearance in 1943.
No body. No funeral. Just rumors:
• She ran off to Europe.
• She went mad.
• She’s still in that house… waiting.
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🌫️ The Architect: Bastian Hart
Bastian Hart grew up hearing ghost stories from his grandmother—stories about her brother, Luca Fontaine, and the woman who “ruined” his legacy.
But Bastian always sensed more beneath the bitterness.
A few years ago, after his grandmother’s passing, Bastian found a box of hidden letters. All unsigned. All filled with longing. One line haunted him:
“They’ll never let us finish our story… but maybe someone else will.”
The letters led him to the name: Vera Vale. The manor. The rumors.
And now, fate brings him there—hired by a woman who doesn’t know the whole truth.
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🪞 The Inheritor: Rowan Vale
Rowan is Vera’s granddaughter, though she barely knew her. Her own mother (Vera’s daughter) never spoke about the manor, except to call it “a prison with a velvet mask.”
Rowan is queer. Quietly.
Not because she’s ashamed—just because she’s tired.
The Vale name was always a weight. Glamour on the outside, silence on the inside. She was raised in a world where emotions were edited out of conversations like bad film takes. But something about the manor—about the photo she finds, the music, the air—it cracks her open.
She begins to remember:
• A lullaby sung by no one.
• Lavender perfume in empty rooms.
• A woman’s voice in her dreams, whispering, “Finish it.”
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🕯️ The Haunting
The manor is not evil.
It’s longing.
A place built with love, buried by shame, kept alive by memory.
Ghosts don’t want to hurt them.
They want to be seen.
Vera and Juliette’s story was never allowed to end.
But maybe Rowan and Bastian are the ones meant to tell it—by living their own truth and uncovering the old one.
NovelToon got authorization from Candy03 to publish this work, the content is the author's own point of view, and does not represent the stand of NovelToon.
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