The Voice Note.

Alice was sitting on the floor with her back against the kitchen cabinet when she first listened to his voice. Her knees were pulled tight to her chest. The light above the sink buzzed faintly. Outside, it was raining, a soft, steady sound that made everything feel smaller, quieter.

The voice note was only fourteen seconds long.

His voice was careful, almost shy. He said her name like he was still deciding how it should sound. There was a pause in the middle, a tiny breath, like he was thinking of saying something else and changed his mind.

She played it three times before she replied.

That was months ago. Maybe a year. She had stopped keeping track.

They never met. They never even video-called. Just voice notes, a few phone calls, and long, late messages that made her feel like someone was reaching across a dark ocean to hold her hand.

He had a way of speaking that curled under her skin. Not charming, exactly ... something gentler. Like he meant what he said. Like he saw her.

And then he disappeared.

Blocked her. Deleted the messages. Vanished as if he’d never existed at all.

But she could still hear him.

Not just in memory. Not just in her mind replaying old words out of habit. She heard him in dreams. In the spaces between waking and sleep. In echoes that clung to the walls when the house was too quiet.

She told herself it wasn’t obsession. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t desperate. She was just... haunted.

That was the only word that fit.

Alice didn’t know when the dreams started. Maybe they had always been there. Maybe they began when the messages ended. In one dream, he was standing at the edge of a field, arms open, saying, “I found you. Finally.”

She woke up with tears on her pillow and no memory of falling asleep.

After that, the dreams kept coming. Some were soft and warm, like memories that never really happened. Others were strange. Darker. Once, she dreamed she was lying in bed and he was whispering in her ear ... not words, just a sound, like humming through fog. She woke to an empty room and the smell of lavender that hadn’t been there before.

She wrote the dreams down in a notebook. Not because she was trying to analyze them. She just needed to hold on to something.

Her friends said she was spiraling. One of them called it “emotional projection.” Another, less kindly, said, “You built a castle out of text messages and now you're shocked it’s not real.”

But they didn’t hear his voice. They didn’t hear the way he said goodbye that last time. Like it hurt him.

He had told her once that people in his life thought she was “too much.” That she felt heavy. Intense. “They think I should be careful with you,” he had said, half-laughing. “But I don’t think you’re dangerous.”

He never messaged her again after that.

Alice tried to forget. She deleted his contact. She buried the photos. But the absence of him was louder than his presence had ever been. It filled her apartment. It followed her through the city. It curled around her shoulders when she tried to sleep.

She started to believe something had taken him away.

Not physically , not like a death or an accident. But spiritually. Silently. As if something unseen had stepped between them and turned him around before he could find his way to her.

She began to wonder if there was magic involved. Not the sparkly kind, not spells and potions but the deep, old magic that lived in dreams and hearts and forgotten corners of the world. The kind that made people vanish. The kind that could bend time. The kind that made a voice feel more real than a kiss.

Alice was not naïve. She had been in love before. She had lived through heartbreak, therapy, healing, and heartbreak again. She knew what longing was. She knew what obsession was.

But this wasn’t that.

This was a quiet ache that didn’t go away.

This was a space inside her shaped exactly like the sound of his voice.

She tried to move on. She lit candles in the morning. She kept her windows open. She took long walks and tried smiling at strangers. She even went on a date with a man who worked in publishing and smelled like cedarwood. But when he spoke, she felt nothing.

His voice didn’t echo. It didn’t warm her bones. It didn’t mean anything.

The next night, she dreamed of the other one again.

He was in a train station this time. Looking for her. Calling her name.

She didn’t sleep for the rest of the week.

Sometimes she wondered if he remembered her. Maybe he dreamed of her, too. Maybe he thought about the voice notes in the same way like messages left inside a bottle, floating between them.

Or maybe she had made the whole thing up.

Maybe he was never really there at all.

Maybe she had taken a few scattered words from a stranger and turned them into a story because she was lonely and tired and needed to believe in something.

But even if that were true... it didn’t make the feeling any less real.

Every night before bed, Alice played the first voice note.

Fourteen seconds.

That was all he left her.

But somehow, it was enough to fill everything he left behind.