The world had gone quiet the day Miso died.

Not the kind of quiet that blankets a room at midnight, but the hollow, pressing silence of something missing—like a breath that never comes. For weeks after, Elara moved through her small apartment like a ghost. She stopped opening the blinds. She stopped listening to music. She stopped… speaking. Even her thoughts felt muffled, like they were being filtered through cotton. The floorboards no longer creaked beneath her steps. Her feet barely touched them.

Miso had been there for everything—twelve years of birthdays, thunderstorms, breakups, moving boxes, and long, rainy Sundays. The soft bump of his head under her chin. The rhythm of his purring like a motor lulling her back from the edge more times than she could count. Now, the apartment was filled with the cruel absence of him. The empty windowsill. The untouched food bowl. The quiet space on the bed where he used to curl like a question mark beside her knees.

For thirty-six days, Elara had not left the apartment. She hadn’t wanted to.

Then, on the thirty-seventh morning, something shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. No great thunderclap of realization. No voice from the sky.

It was just… the light.

It spilled, timid and golden, through a sliver in the living room curtains she’d forgotten to close. She was shuffling by, a mug of untouched tea in hand, when the sun caught her. Warm fingers brushed her cheek. She froze.

It didn’t burn. It didn’t accuse her. It just was—soft and alive and patient.

Her skin, dry and pale from too many days under blankets, drank it in like something starved. The heat bled across her face, into her closed eyelids, and down her spine. It painted amber onto the dust motes dancing lazily in the air, made them look like fireflies frozen in time.

Elara stood there, motionless, as if moving would break the spell.

A sound bubbled up from her chest—unexpected and unpracticed. A sob. Not the kind born from fresh pain, but the kind that happens when something dormant is waking up. Her knees buckled slightly, and she sank onto the couch, letting the sunlight touch her fully now, washing over her like an old lullaby. Her mug rested cold in her hands.

The scent of dust and chamomile tea wrapped around her. Her breath caught as her eyes landed on the corner of the room—the one Miso used to claim every morning at sunrise, perched like a little king in a sunbeam.

He loved the sun. Always chased it.

And somehow, she felt—no, knew—he would have wanted her to feel it, too.

Her chest ached, but it was a different kind of ache. Not sharp and suffocating, but slow and stretching. A thaw.

The wind outside whispered against the window. A bird trilled a messy song from the telephone wire. Elara looked up, the golden light warming the streaks of tears drying on her cheeks. And she whispered, hoarsely, to the room still echoing with his absence.

“I miss you.”

No reply. Just the sun, waiting.

But that was enough.

She pulled the curtain back, just a little more. The light poured in.