I didn't expect the day to start with her voice.
The sun hadn't risen yet. The city was still wrapped in fog like an old man clutching his coat. My phone buzzed beside the ashtray I hadn't touched in six months, and I ignored it the way you ignore a knock at the door when you already know it's bad news.
But then I heard it.
The voice.
Her voice.
Elena.
Not a memory. Not a hallucination from another sleepless night.
A real voice. Alive. Singing. Through the cracked Bluetooth speaker I forgot was still on.
I froze.
No one else could've known that melody. I never released it. I never let it leave my studio. We wrote it the night before her accident — just us, a bottle of red wine, and a half-broken piano. She sang it once. I cried through the whole recording. We never got to fix it.
But now, here it was, on my speaker… perfected. Glitchless. Studio-clean.
AI.
I knew it before the second verse dropped. Someone had rebuilt her voice.
"Is this some kind of sick joke?" I asked the silence.
The track played on. Her tone — warm, deep, vibrato slipping through the edges like always. But in the bridge… there was a change.
A line we never wrote.
> "If you find this, Ezra... it's not too late to forgive yourself."
My hands trembled.
It wasn't a remix.
It was a message.
I stood up so fast the stool behind me cracked against the floor. Grabbed my phone. The screen was lit with dozens of notifications.
Trending on TikTok: "The Dead Singer Who Came Back"
@theresthevoice: 2.3M views in 8 hours
"Is this real? This sounds like a ghost trying to talk to someone named Ezra..."
I clicked the video. There she was — Elena's AI-cloned voice layered over an old photo of her smiling on the beach, backlit with fireflies and captions that said:
> "This was found in an anonymous dropbox. The voice has no match in public records. But in the bridge, she says a name. Ezra. Anyone know who he is?"
My heart dropped into something colder than fear.
---
I didn't even know how to scream. So I didn't. I sat back down. Let the song play again.
Was this someone's twisted way of going viral?
A scam? A producer desperate for clicks?
But no one had that vocal file. It was on a hard drive buried behind the walls of my old studio — the one I locked the day after she died and never returned to.
Unless…
Unless she uploaded it herself.
My thoughts tangled, fraying like a worn-out cassette.
The guilt came rushing back like floodwater, pulling every memory out of its hiding place.
The last fight we had before the crash.
Her voice, quiet, saying, "Don't let the music die in you too."
Me, choosing silence anyway.
Me, wasting six years pretending silence was some kind of justice.
I stood. Pacing.
The phone buzzed again.
Unknown Number: "Check your email. You have seven days. Tell her story before someone else does."
Attached: A download link. No label. No name.
Just: "Day 1: Her Voice."
---
It took me 47 years to find something worth living for.
Then it took me 7 years to lose it.
And now?
I have 7 days to figure out why she's singing again.