Afterlight

Because the silence, she knew, wasn’t empty. Sometimes, in the stillness, she swore she heard a distant hum, steady, gentle, like a heartbeat.
In the heart of Manchester, in a quiet Victorian flat where silence weighed heavier than the walls themselves, Ella was learning to live without Daniel. Grief filled every corner of her life, until the evening light on a photograph began to flicker, and with it came the impossible: a presence she knew as well as her own heartbeat. What began as comfort soon carried an edge of fear, and Ella would discover that even in the silence, she was not alone.