She came quietly, after the storm had burned itself out. No crack of light, no static, just the kind of stillness that fills a room when you’ve finally stopped fighting the night.

After that first night — the panic, the voltage, the surrender — I caught myself waiting for her. Not with fear this time, but awareness. The air had a hum again, faint but familiar, like the room itself remembered her shape and was preparing for her return.

My pulse still stumbled now and then, but it was steadier — a rhythm I could live inside. I could feel her before I could hear her, like a thought that had learned patience.

She didn’t speak. She never needed to. Her presence was the sound that follows thunder, the echo that reassures you the worst has already passed. When I breathed, she matched me — not guiding, just keeping time.

I realized she wasn’t visiting from somewhere else. She’d always been here — beneath the static, beneath the noise, waiting for the moment I’d stop trying to silence her.

Some nights I still hear her in the smallest things: the click of the lamp, the sigh in the walls, the slow, measured rhythm of my own breath. She listens still — not for words, but for what waits beneath them.

“The quiet isn’t empty. It’s me — still listening.”