The room was silent, but silence had learned how to lie.
I sat on the cold floor with my back against the wall, recorder in my hand, thumb hovering over the cracked red button. The device was old—older than most of the memories it carried—but it still worked. It always did. Some things refused to break, no matter how many times you dropped them.
I pressed play.
At first there was only static, a hiss like distant rain. Then my voice emerged.
Not my voice as I was now—strained, roughened by years of swallowing words—but the voice I used to have. Clear. Certain. Alive.
"Testing," it said. "If anyone ever hears this… I hope it means I made it out."
My chest tightened. I didn't remember recording this. Or maybe I did, and my mind had buried it the way it buried everything else that hurt too much to carry.
The memory surged without warning.
I was back in the old broadcasting booth, red light glowing above the door, dust floating through the beam like tiny ghosts. Back when my voice mattered. Back when people listened.
Back before the night everything went wrong.
The present snapped back into place when the recorder clicked softly, as if aware it had said too much. I shut it off, breathing hard, palms slick with sweat. The walls seemed closer now, leaning in, listening.
They always were.
"Get a grip," I whispered, though even that sounded foreign to me.
For years, my voice had been my identity. On the radio, I wasn't invisible. I wasn't forgotten. I was heard. People wrote in, called, stayed awake at night just to listen. They said my voice felt like memory itself—warm, familiar, impossible to ignore.
Then the broadcasts stopped.
Then she disappeared.
I stood and crossed the room, stepping over cables and half-packed boxes. The apartment was temporary, like every place I'd lived since the incident. I never stayed long enough for walls to learn my name. On the desk by the window lay the envelope that had started all of this again—no return address, my name written in a careful hand.
Inside it, one sentence.
You don't remember everything. Your voice does.
At the time, I'd laughed it off. A cruel joke. A fan who'd gone too far. But then the tapes started arriving. Recordings I didn't remember making. Files dated years after I'd gone silent.
And they all sounded like me.
I picked up the newest tape and turned it over in my hands. The label read: Chapter 24.
My pulse skipped.
Whoever was sending these wasn't just playing with me. They were documenting me—my life, my gaps, my forgotten hours—as if I were a story being told by someone else.
Outside, a car passed, headlights sweeping briefly through the room. In that flash of light, I caught my reflection in the window. I barely recognized the man staring back. Older. Thinner. Eyes hollowed by questions that never got answers.
"What did you do?" I asked him.
He didn't respond.
I slid the tape into the recorder.
This time, there was no static. No delay. My voice began immediately, calm and deliberate.
"Chapter twenty-four," it said. "This is where you start to remember why you stopped speaking."
My breath caught.
"You're sitting in a room right now," the voice continued, "thinking you lost your voice because of fear. Because of grief. Because of what happened to Mara."
Mara.
The name hit like a physical blow. My knees weakened, and I sank into the chair.
"You tell yourself you were protecting yourself," the recording said. "But that's not the truth."
My hands trembled so badly I nearly dropped the recorder.
"The truth is, you discovered something. Something hidden in the frequencies. In the pauses between words. You heard it first because you listened more closely than anyone else ever had."
A low hum crept into the background of the tape, almost musical, almost alive.
"It wasn't just sound," my voice said. "It was memory. Stored. Echoing. Voices don't disappear—they linger. And some of them don't want to be forgotten."
Images flooded my mind—late nights in the booth, headphones pressed tight, adjusting dials while something whispered just beneath the broadcast signal. I'd told myself it was interference. Fatigue. Imagination.
But I'd kept recording.
"You realized voices could carry more than words," the tape went on. "They could carry truth. Guilt. Confessions."
My stomach twisted.
"And someone realized you realized."
The hum grew louder. Sharper.
"Mara tried to stop you," the voice said softly. "She said some memories should stay buried. That if people heard what was trapped in the recordings, it would destroy them."
Tears blurred my vision.
"But you didn't stop."
The recorder paused.
When my voice returned, it was no longer calm.
"And that's why she's gone."
The tape clicked off.
The silence that followed was heavier than any sound. I sat there, shaking, the weight of twenty-four chapters pressing down on me.
I hadn't lost my voice.
I'd buried it.
Because some memories, once spoken, refuse to stay in the past.
And somewhere out there, the echoes were waiting for me to finish the story.