For a hundred years, the man beneath the opera house has been alone with his music. He is about to be heard.

Meg Harlow has loved the Phantom's story since she was a girl. Now she sings in a London production of it, an American soprano with a gift she's never been able to explain - she feels what other people cannot, hears what spaces are holding long after everyone else has gone home.

Something she can't name draws her to Paris. Alone, she descends beneath the old opera house - and discovers that the story she's performed for years was never fiction. Erik is still there. Still in the dark. Still composing for an audience of no one. And for the first time in a century, someone has come down the steps who can hear him.

What begins as a candle flame bending toward a question becomes a conversation, then a collaboration, then something neither of them has a name for. He teaches her what her voice can become. She does the one thing no one - not Christine, not the world that made him a monster - ever managed to do.

She looks at all of him, and she does not turn away.

Inspired by Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, The Man Behind the Mask is a haunting, time-spanning story about music, grief, and the difference between being looked at and being seen - and about the kind of connection that comes a century late and is no less real for it.