"There are places where silence sounds like someone trying to speak."
⸻
I returned to the library every day after that.
Same entrance. Same creaking floorboards. Same seat at the back near the flickering lamp that still pulsed like a broken signal.
Same book—Her Name Was Yesterday.
But each time I opened it, something had changed.
It never began the way I left it.
Sometimes the first sentence was halfway through the narrative.
Sometimes whole paragraphs had rearranged themselves.
Once, I flipped to a page that had been blank the day before—now inked with a memory I didn't know I had, written in a voice that wasn't entirely mine.
It was like the book was watching me read it.
Like it was remembering with me.
Or worse—remembering me.
⸻
By the third day, I started to feel the air shift around me when I read aloud.
Not colder, not warmer. Just… stranger.
As if the space itself leaned in a little closer, holding its breath.
So I brought a recorder. A cheap, handheld one.
Not because I wanted to prove the book existed—I was well past trying to convince anyone.
I just wanted a voice outside my own. Something real, something I could rewind and replay. Something that didn't rely on memory.
I sat down and pressed record.
Then began to read:
"He dreamt of a house where the mirrors didn't reflect, only listened.
In every dream, she stood beside him but never looked his way.
She only whispered one thing:
'You left me in the part of you that forgot how to need.'"
My voice filled the room softly. Familiar. Faintly cracked.
But then—beneath it—another voice rose.
Not loud. Not even distinct.
A breath, threaded with words.
Like someone reading alongside me, a half-second behind.
Almost like a memory trying to catch up.
At first, I thought it was the acoustics. An echo.
The hollow chamber of the archive floor playing tricks on my ears.
But then the whisper shifted.
It said:
"You were never supposed to remember all of it."
Not from the book. Not from my mouth.
A sentence not written anywhere.
I froze. My throat dried.
The recorder slipped from my hand and clattered onto the floor.
The sound echoed off the stone walls like glass shattering underwater.
⸻
The next thing I remember is sitting in the stairwell, my back pressed to cold concrete.
Hands shaking. Heart beating like a code I didn't know how to read.
The librarian found me there.
A tall woman. Mid-fifties maybe. Hair pulled back in a bun too tight, eyes the color of old paper.
She knelt beside me and said gently, "Are you alright?"
Her tone was kind—but cautious. Like someone approaching a wounded animal.
I swallowed.
"Do you know who Elara Morrin is?" I asked.
The change in her was instant.
A flicker in her eyes. A step back. Her expression became… unreadable.
"You should go home," she said. "You've been here a long time."
"No," I pressed. "The book—Her Name Was Yesterday. You must've seen it. Downstairs. Archive level. It's real."
She hesitated.
Then said quietly, "There's no such book in our catalog."
My pulse spiked. "But I've been reading it—"
"There never was," she interrupted, firmer this time. And then, almost as if it slipped out without permission:
"Some stories write you back. Be careful which ones you open."
She didn't wait for a reply.
⸻
That night, I sat on my bedroom floor and played the recording.
The first few minutes were uneventful.
My voice, soft and steady, reading each line.
Pages turning. A breath. A sigh.
Then—clear as wind curling through a door left ajar—it came.
A whisper.
"Aiden, you forgot who found you."
I dropped the recorder again. Not out of fear.
Out of something colder.
Something more intimate.
Because I knew that voice.
It was mine.
But not this version of me.
It was younger. More certain.
The voice of the boy who had known her.
The boy who had lost her.
⸻
I didn't sleep.
Instead, I sat by the window, watching the empty street below.
Waiting for yellow to appear.
Her raincoat. Her shadow. Her reflection in the glass.
She didn't come.
But the silence pressed closer than usual. Like it was holding something back.
⸻
By morning, I knew what I had to do.
If I couldn't find her through the book…
And I couldn't trust what my memory offered…
Then maybe—just maybe—she left me something else.
A different kind of trail.
I pulled the old box from the top of the closet.
Cardboard taped, water-stained, scuffed by time.
Inside were fragments of a younger self:
Childhood journals, scribbled drawings, cassette tapes without cases.
Half-finished poems. Torn pages.
A blue shoelace I used as a bookmark once. I remembered none of it.
Near the bottom, I found something folded into itself.
A paper.
Faded. Yellowed. The ink running in places like it had weathered a storm.
In shaking writing, it said:
"You said if I ever disappeared, I should follow the echo.
That's what I'm doing now."
—E
I flipped it over.
There was a drawing on the back.
Not a professional one—just lines, shadows, scrawled in the hand of someone desperate to remember what a dream looked like.
A house.
No clocks.
No lights in the windows.
A mirror cracked down the middle.
And a boy staring at his reflection—while the reflection leaned in to whisper something through the glass.
⸻
I didn't go back to the library the next day.
I went looking for the house.