Chapter 3: Echoes of You

Leah’s apartment was dim, papered in sheet music and takeout containers. A single lamp lit her keyboard, where she sat hunched, eyes closed, lips forming silent verses.

Miles hovered near the ceiling.

He didn’t mean to—he didn’t fly, not really. He was drawn there, suspended above the moment like a memory that hadn’t faded all the way.

The room was humming with grief.

Not the loud, screaming kind. The quiet ache that sat behind the eyes and echoed in every pause between notes.

Miles leaned in. His essence, if you could call it that, resonated against the energy in the room—Leah’s sadness like a current, her fingers trembling over black and white keys.

She was singing again. The same chords. The same melody he half-scribbled in a Waffle House napkin during a night no one remembered but him. Only now it had new words.

“You left in the middle of the chorus / I was still holding the line…”

He winced. Damn. That’s good.

Not because it was polished. But because it was real.

Miles felt the pull again—an instinct, like he could reach out and help her find the right phrase. He opened his mind like a window, let a whisper thread out.

Bridge… try going to the minor… let it ache there…

Leah hesitated, blinked, then shifted keys.

The note hung in the air like a truth. Her eyes widened.

Miles felt it. The thread. The connection.

It wasn’t control. It was communion.

But that came with a price.

As she played, memories began to rise in his own mind—his apartment at 24, half-packed boxes, a rejection email still open on his laptop. The moment he almost gave up. The first time he played the song Leah had now breathed new life into.

I wrote it when I was ready to disappear.

She’s playing it because she wants to stay.

He drifted lower, no longer separate. Leah’s pain was pressing into his chest now. It wasn’t just hers anymore. He felt her loneliness like an echo of his own.

A beat passed. Then two.

Leah’s fingers stilled. She looked up, as if sensing someone.

“Who are you?” she whispered, not expecting an answer.

Miles didn’t speak. Couldn’t. But he focused on her—on everything in him that still remembered how it felt to be 22 and desperate to make something that mattered.

A breeze touched her cheek. Or maybe it was nothing.

She wiped her eyes, sniffled, then reached for her pencil. “Okay,” she said aloud. “One more verse.”

She began writing.

Miles returned to the Frequency hours later, heavier than when he left.

Cassiel was waiting in the studio, perched on the soundboard like a vulture on a throne.

“So?” he asked, lighting a new cigarette with a flick of his ghostly thumb. “Did you push too hard?”

Miles shook his head. “No. I… nudged. She did the work.”

Cassiel tilted his head. “And how do you feel?”

“Like I remember what it was like to love music.” Miles paused, then added quietly, “And what it was like to be afraid of it.”

Cassiel’s gaze softened. “That fear made you human.”

A faint hum interrupted them. One of the five glowing orbs above Miles’s head now pulsed brighter—its center lit with a soft amber glow.

Cassiel whistled. “One down.”

Miles looked up at the orb.

Not triumph. Not pride.

Just a quiet sense of rightness.

Later, alone in the quiet studio, Miles replayed Leah’s last verse in his mind:

“Echoes of you still sing through my ribs / not gone, just hidden inside…”

He hadn’t written it. But it was his song now, too.

And somewhere between the lines, he’d found a piece of himself he thought had vanished when the lights went out.