Chapter 1: Echoes for Hire

Chapter 1: Echoes for Hire

The tremor in Sofia’s hands had a rhythm all its own, a frantic, jittery beat against the chipped ceramic of her coffee mug. The coffee inside was cold, a sludgy black mirror reflecting the dim glow of her laptop screen. On it, two words blinked in hateful red: EVICTION NOTICE. They’d been blinking for three days, a digital heartbeat for her impending doom.

Her apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled of stale whiskey and decay, was her fortress and her prison. Piles of books—once her passion, now just precarious towers of dust—leaned against walls stained with the ghosts of spilled drinks. A single window, grimy with city soot, looked out onto a brick wall, offering no escape, only a reflection of her own confinement.

Sofia took a shaky drag from the butt of her last cigarette, the smoke clawing at her throat. It wasn't the eviction that terrified her, not really. It was the silence that would come after, the silence that always waited just beneath the surface of her life. The same silence her father had left behind.

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the image was always there, seared onto the backs of her eyelids. Not his face, not his smile from old family photos, but the aftermath. The thing the police report had so clinically described as a “self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Sofia called it something else. The scarlet cave. A wet, gaping maw where his face should have been, a silent, screaming testament to the words he never wrote.

No note. That was the cruelest part. He had just… stopped. Left her with a lifetime of unanswered questions that festered and rotted inside her. Why? Was it her? Was it the world? The not-knowing was a poison she’d been drinking for seven years, chasing it with whatever cheap liquor or chalky pills she could afford.

The tremor in her hands worsened. The cravings were a physical beast, gnawing at her insides, demanding to be fed. The eviction notice blinked. Money. She needed money.

Her journalism degree was a bad joke, a worthless piece of paper from a life that belonged to someone else. The girl who’d graduated with honors, the one with a promising future and a sharp, incisive mind, was dead. Sofia was just the ghost haunting her corpse. But the ghost still knew how to write.

An idea, vile and brilliant, slithered into her mind. It had been circling for weeks, a vulture waiting for her to be weak enough to accept it. She thought of all the others like her, the ones left behind, drowning in the silence of a loved one’s final, desperate act. They craved closure, an explanation, a final word. Anything to fill the void.

She could give them that.

Her fingers, now steady with a grim sense of purpose, flew across the keyboard. She navigated to the darkest corners of the web, forums where grief was a commodity and anonymity was currency. She crafted the post with the cold precision of a surgeon.

TITLE: Final Words - Professional Eulogy and Legacy Services

BODY: Have you been left with silence? Do you ache for the words that were never written? I offer a unique, discreet service. Based on your memories, correspondence, and descriptions, I will craft an authentic, heartfelt final letter. A suicide note. The echo of a voice you long to hear one last time. For closure. For peace. For a price.

She posted it and leaned back, the cheap office chair groaning under her weight. A wave of nausea washed over her. It was monstrous. Profiteering from the most profound pain a human could experience. It was also her only way out. She was selling professionally packaged lies to the brokenhearted.

The first email arrived less than an hour later. The subject line was simply: For my son.

Sofia’s heart hammered against her ribs. She clicked it open. The message was from a woman named Carol, her words disjointed and raw. Her son, Brandon, seventeen, had hanged himself in his closet a week ago. He was quiet, she wrote. He loved video games. He felt invisible. He’d left nothing behind but a shattered family. She couldn’t bear the silence. She’d pay anything.

The closet. The detail snagged in Sofia’s mind, a fishhook in her gut.

She demanded half the payment upfront—five hundred dollars. It hit her account within minutes. The number glowed on her screen, a profane blessing. This was real. Blood money.

Sofia poured a generous slug of whiskey into her mug. The first gulp burned, a welcome fire that cauterized the edges of her conscience. She read Carol’s email again and again, absorbing the details, the fragments of a life she was about to desecrate. Brandon. Seventeen. Quiet. Invisible.

She opened a blank document. She wasn’t Sofia anymore. She was Brandon. She channeled the hollow ache of teenage loneliness, the sting of being unseen, the crushing weight of a world that didn’t seem to have a place for him. Her journalism training kicked in—the ability to mimic a voice, to find the emotional core of a story. But this wasn't a story. This was an autopsy of a soul.

Mom, she began, the word tasting like ash in her mouth.

I’m sorry. The silence was just too loud in my head. Louder than the games, louder than anything. It’s not your fault. I just… couldn’t find the cheat code for this level. Please don’t be sad. In the quiet, I’ll finally be at peace.

She kept it short, simple, gut-wrenchingly plausible. A cocktail of apology, despair, and a teenager’s clumsy attempt at poetry. She polished the sentences until they gleamed with false sincerity. Then, holding her breath, she attached the document and hit ‘send.’

The response was almost immediate.

Thank you. Oh god, thank you. It’s his voice. It’s him.

The second payment notification followed. A thousand dollars. Enough for rent, for pills, for enough whiskey to drown the entire goddamn city.

A giddy, nauseating relief flooded her. She had done it. She had turned her own trauma into a product. She’d sold a lie and been rewarded for it.

Pushing away from the desk, she walked through the cluttered darkness of her apartment. The money was just a number on a screen. She needed to feel it, to hold the physical proof of her sin. She grabbed her jacket and headed for the nearest ATM.

The night air was cold, a slap in the face that did nothing to clear her head. The machine whirred and spat out a thick stack of crisp twenty-dollar bills. Sofia clutched them in her fist, the paper slick and real. This was salvation. This was her fix. This was her rent. This was the price of a boy’s ghost.

Back in her apartment, the silence felt different. Heavier. Charged. She locked the door, the deadbolt sliding home with a definitive thud. For the first time in days, the blinking red of the eviction notice held no power over her. She had won.

She tossed the cash onto her unmade bed, the bills scattering across the rumpled sheets. She stood for a moment in the center of the room, listening to the familiar sounds of the city outside—a distant siren, the rumble of a passing train. Normal sounds. Grounding sounds.

Then, a new sound cut through the quiet.

It came from the closet. The one in the corner of her room, its door slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of impenetrable blackness.

It wasn’t the creak of an old building settling. It was too slow for that. Too deliberate.

Creeeeak.

The sound of wood straining under a slow, heavy weight. The sound of a door opening one agonizing inch at a time.

Sofia froze, her blood turning to ice water in her veins. The hairs on her arms stood on end. Her gaze was locked on that sliver of darkness, which seemed to be infinitesimally widening.

She wasn’t alone. The thought slammed into her not as a suspicion, but as a certainty. The silence Brandon had left was gone. And something else had taken its place.