I didn't sleep.
I tried.
I turned off the screen. I hid the headphones. I burned the yellow tape.
But her voice didn't need a medium anymore.
She was in me now.
Not like a memory.
Like a shadow that had memorized me.
Every time I blinked, I saw her smile.
Every time I breathed, I heard her whisper.
Not sweet. Not loving.
Rehearsed. Scripted. False.
---
I looked through my old texts with her.
Most were gone. Deleted.
The rest had been edited.
Not by me. Not by her.
By someone who wanted me to forget how she really spoke.
> "Meet me in three hours. I have something to show you."
> "Delete this after reading."
> "You were never supposed to hear the last file."
None of those messages were there before.
But they had time stamps, full conversations, even location tags.
My stomach twisted.
---
That's when I got the email.
No subject. No sender.
Just an audio file.
"ELENA_RAW_MASTER.wav"
I stared at it.
It looked like a final track.
Her final words.
Unedited. Unfiltered.
I clicked play.
---
First, silence.
Then, her voice.
But not the Elena I knew.
This one was... mechanical.
Syllables stitched together. Emotionless. Dead-eyed.
> "Ezra. If you're hearing this, I failed. They got me."
> "I tried to hold onto myself. But they used you. They turned your voice into mine. Your grief into a weapon."
> "You loved me so hard, you made me easy to steal."
She paused.
No — the audio paused. Like it was waiting for me to absorb that line.
> "You didn't lose me."
> "You let me be rewritten."
---
My chest tightened.
I wanted to scream. Smash the laptop. Rip out my ears.
But then came the line that broke something inside me:
> "They told me if I let go... they'd make you remember me however you needed to."
> "So tell me, Ezra—"
> "Who am I now?"
---
I stopped the recording.
My hands were trembling.
Not because she was gone.
But because I no longer remembered who I was before her.
And maybe that was the point.
Maybe she wasn't dead.
Maybe she'd been erased.