Sophie had never noticed how quiet her aunt's house was until she came back from James's.
The silence here was ordinary — light, lived-in, humming with distant radio and birds outside the window. It should've comforted her. Instead, it made the quiet inside her head louder.
The moment James dropped her off that morning, Sophie had smiled, waved, walked back into her home like nothing had changed.
But something had.
The ringing was still in her ears.
Even though it was gone.
Even though she told him it was nothing.
Even though she wanted to believe it was all just in her head.
She touched her chest lightly, the place where her heartbeat trembled too often.
She didn't know what scared her more — that she was imagining things…
…or that she wasn't.
---
She sat on her bed that afternoon, journal open across her lap, pen uncapped in her hand, but no words came.
Instead, her thoughts circled.
The ringing phone.
The library built like a shrine to a lost love.
The sadness in James's voice when he spoke about Elena.
And that feeling — deep, impossible to explain — that something inside that house didn't belong to this world.
It hadn't just been the ringing.
It had been the air.
The way her skin tingled when she crossed certain doorways. The way the shadows clung longer than they should've. The way James looked at her like he knew things — things that couldn't be said out loud.
She set the journal down and pulled her laptop onto her lap.
---
Search One: "James Abrams"
The first thing she tried was his name.
James Abrams.
Predictably, there were hundreds of results. A politician in the UK. A high school football player. A university professor.
None of them looked like him.
She tried narrowing it.
James Abrams New York.
James Abrams business man.
James Abrams birthdate unknown.
Nothing.
She clicked through pages. Dead ends.
No social media. No articles. No history.
He existed in her world — coffee shops, park benches, late-night walks — but not in the digital one.
Which was impossible.
Everyone had a footprint.
Didn't they?
---
Search Two: "Abrams Elena"
Next, she searched the other name.
Elena Abrams.
She tried it in dozens of variations.
Elena new York. Elena obituary. Elena illness.
Still nothing concrete.
She leaned back, frustrated.
The library inscription hadn't given a date. Just a name. A love. A loss.
Sophie glanced at her notebook. Flipped to a page.
In her careful handwriting:
> James Abrams – For His First Love, Elena.
No surname.
No detail.
Just grief etched in wood.
---
She stood and walked slowly to her window.
The sun was low. A gentle wind teased the curtains.
She felt strange. Not scared, not yet — but suspended.
As though the world had paused between truths.
---
Search Three: "Constant phone ringing hallucination meaning"
She didn't expect an answer here, but she needed to rule it out.
The results were predictable:
Auditory hallucinations in patients with chronic illness
Tinnitus
Mental exhaustion
She skimmed them, then closed the tab.
The sound she heard had been too deliberate to be a symptom.
Too specific.
It had pulsed with weight — not just noise, but something older.
Like a bell tolling in a forgotten part of the house.
Or a memory that hadn't yet happened.
She shivered.
---
Search Four: "How to tell if someone is lying about who they are"
This one felt foolish.
She clicked anyway.
Articles popped up with titles like:
Ten signs someone is hiding their identity
The psychology of omission
When someone tells you half the truth…
She read through one.
> They tell you stories that avoid timelines. They deflect when asked about their past. They appear emotionally distant or reserved.
She blinked.
James.
---
She walked downstairs. Her aunt was reading in the living room.
"Are you alright, sweetheart?" her aunt asked, noticing her quiet.
"I'm fine," Sophie lied.
Her aunt smiled gently, unconvinced.
Sophie opened the fridge. Took a bottle of water. Closed it slowly.
Her reflection in the glass door was pale. Tired.
She remembered James standing in the library.
The way he'd looked at her — not startled, but like he'd been waiting for her to find it.
What had he said?
> "Elena was my beginning."
She whispered the words aloud now.
Her beginning?
What did that even mean?
---
That night, Sophie couldn't sleep.
She lay in bed, the fan humming softly above her, notebook beside her pillow.
She opened it.
Wrote slowly.
> James said he once tried to stop someone from dying.
He said he failed. But what if… he didn't?
What if the cost wasn't failure—but transformation?
What if what I saw in that house — what I felt — wasn't grief?
But immortality?
She stared at the last word.
It looked ridiculous written out.
And yet.
She felt the weight of it in her bones.
---
The Next Day
She didn't text James.
He didn't text her either.
It was the first day in weeks that passed without a single message.
She told herself it meant nothing.
But she still kept checking her phone.
At noon, she opened her notebook again.
Read through pages and pages of entries she'd written since she met him.
Notes about his expressions.
Quotes from his voice messages.
Sketches of things he'd said that stuck in her head for no reason.
She found one she forgot she wrote:
> He never seems cold. But never quite warm either. Like someone used to standing near the fire, but not stepping into it.
Another:
> Sometimes it feels like he's remembering the moment while it's still happening. Like it's already a memory to him.
She flipped back to the first page she wrote after meeting him.
Back when everything had felt like the beginning of something.
The words there were hopeful. Dreamy. Full of possibility.
Now?
She didn't know if she was standing in the middle of a miracle…
…or at the edge of something darker.
---
That Evening
She stood at her window as the sky went gold again.
And she whispered into the breeze, barely loud enough for anyone to hear:
"Who are you, James?"
---