Chapter 8: The Night of Voices

The ward was quiet after midnight.

The lights had been dimmed to a faint amber glow, and the steady hum of machines filled the silence with a fragile rhythm. Nurses moved softly between rooms, their shoes whispering on the linoleum.

Stella lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Her legs, suspended in their white shells, felt impossibly heavy. The painkillers dulled the ache, but her mind would not rest. Every heartbeat seemed to echo inside her skull, a pulse that did not belong only to her.

At first, she thought it was a dream — a flicker of sadness, not her own. Then another.

A man’s anxiety, sharp and desperate, bled into her chest like cold water. Someone else’s loneliness brushed the edge of her thoughts — a hollow longing for home. The faint cry of an old woman, silent in the room next door, filled her with sudden terror.

Stella gasped. She could feel their emotions as clearly as her own pain. Fear tightened her throat, confusion burned behind her eyes. She tried to push the feelings away, but they came harder now — grief, panic, regret — colliding, overlapping, swallowing her like a tide.