There was a time when Veqty didn't know loneliness.
The mornings used to be filled with soft rustlings of sheets, of warm arms curling around her waist, and of breath tickling the nape of her neck. The scent of fresh coffee would drift in from the kitchen, and a clatter or two would follow—he was always clumsy with dishes. But he'd smile when she walked in, and that smile would make everything else disappear.
Alan Christof. Her husband. Her best friend. Her favorite mistake and her only home.
They met when they were eight—two kids in oversized backpacks, bonded over scraped knees and shared snacks. Life did as it always does: it carried them forward. They went to the same high school, fell into the same university, and before they knew it, fell into each other's arms, this time with adult certainty.
He was training to become a doctor. She pursued art, eventually moving into digital design. They married under a veil of cherry blossoms when they were twenty-four. He said she looked like the spring itself. She laughed and called him a fool. He didn't deny it.
Now, twelve years later, Veqty stood barefoot in their kitchen, rubbing her slightly rounded belly, a mischievous smile playing on her lips. She was seven months pregnant with their first child—a little girl, as the last ultrasound had revealed. They hadn't picked a name yet. Alan wanted something classic. She wanted something wild.
They argued. Lovingly.
But lately, Alan had been working longer hours. Emergencies at the hospital. Night shifts. Double shifts. He would come home exhausted, sometimes forgetting to even remove his shoes before collapsing onto the couch. She knew it wasn't his fault. People needed him. Patients relied on him.
But so did she.
She missed the way he used to whisper to her belly. Missed how he'd hold her at night, talking about baby cribs and bedtime stories. Now, those talks were replaced with rushed dinners and empty couches.
And so, in a moment of selfishness, a playful kind, Veqty dialed his number.
"Alan?" Her voice trembled, just a little. "I… I think something's wrong. I've been getting cramps and the baby's not moving."
She wasn't lying entirely. The baby hadn't moved all morning.
On the other end, Alan's voice dropped into that calm, clinical tone he used with patients. "Are you bleeding? Pain scale, how bad is it?"
"Just… please come home," she whispered.
There was silence. A beat. Then: "I'll be there in twenty."
He arrived seventeen minutes later, still in his white coat, hospital badge swinging around his neck. His eyes were sharp with worry, and the moment he saw her, his arms wrapped around her like armor.
"Hospital," he said, not asking, just deciding. "Now."
She nodded, guilt beginning to coil inside her. But she craved his closeness too much to stop him. Just a few hours. Just the drive. She just wanted his attention. Was that so wrong?
The streets were slick from a drizzle, the kind that painted the asphalt in dark gray.
They were halfway to the hospital, his hand resting on hers, when it happened.
A sound. A scream of screeching tires. A horn. Then silence, then everything.
The truck didn't even try to stop.
It barreled through the red light, engine growling like some mechanical beast drunk on speed. Later, she'd find out the driver was high, narcotics and exhaustion. But in that moment, the only thing Veqty saw was blinding metal and Alan's body turning to shield her.
Their small sedan flipped twice, maybe three times, glass exploding, the world a blur of chaos. Pain bloomed like fire through her abdomen, and the scream she tried to let out was crushed beneath shattering impact.
Then stillness.
The car lay mangled like a crushed insect.
"Veq…" Alan's voice was barely a whisper.
She blinked, barely able to keep her eyes open. The interior smelled of gasoline and blood.
Alan was beside her, or above her. She couldn't tell. Something long and dark—a steel rod—had pierced clean through his torso, impaling the seat, holding him still. His eyes were glassy, but they found hers with unbearable clarity.
"I'm… sorry," he rasped."No…" Her voice cracked, choked. "Don't… no, no…"
"I knew you lied, you little… brat," he tried to laugh, blood bubbling on his lips. "You just wanted me home."
His fingers, warm and wet, found her cheek. She gripped his wrist like it was the only thing anchoring her to life.
"Don't feel guilty," he murmured. "I'm… glad I came."
She shook her head violently. "No, shut up. Shut up, Alan. You're going to be fine, we'll get help, the ambulance is coming"
"Veqty." His tone changed. Deeper. Final. "Listen. If… if we don't make it"
"No."
"If I don't—"
"Alan, please!"
His breath hitched, his mouth opening and closing as though grasping for one last thread of will.
"I loved every minute," he whispered. "Every fight. Every night. Every morning with you. I… I don't want you to be alone. You have my permission if you need it, marry someone else, someday. Someone who won't… leave you like this."
"Don't say that! I don't want anyone else! I only want you!"
He smiled, painfully. "In another life, then. All my love, in the next one."
She screamed his name, sobbed it as his eyes fluttered, and he touched her one last time with hands now trembling and soaked in red. The rod groaned as he shivered. Then his eyes closed.
Just like that.
Silence.
"No. No. No!"
Only then did Veqty notice the warmth between her legs. Not comforting warmth. Not life, thick red blood blood.
The pain finally bloomed—sharp, like a predator's bite. She looked down and saw the metal shard lodged in her stomach, partially impaled through her side. Her hands shook, moving to her belly. Wetness. More blood, the baby!
"No…"
Her body wanted to shut down. Her limbs turned numb. But Alan's last words rang in her head like church bells tolling.
"In another life…"
She bit down on her own lip and began crawling out of the wreckage, glass cutting her palms, rain soaking her skin. A bystander was already calling the police, shouting something she couldn't hear. A scream pierced the distance. Maybe it was hers. Maybe it wasn't.
She looked back one last time.
Alan's lifeless form slumped in the mangled remains of the car, still somehow warm in her memory. The man who made her laugh, who made her want to live, who gave her love and life was now... dead.
The paramedics arrived soon, but the world had already ended for her.
Veqty awoke in a white hospital bed.
A curtain was drawn halfway, the monitor beeping slowly. Pain like a vice gripping her lower body.
A doctor entered with the air of someone who had repeated this speech too many times, and still hated every time he had to.
"Miss Christof. You're awake. That's… good."
She said nothing.
"There was… extensive damage to your abdomen. We had to perform an emergency surgery. Your baby…" He faltered.
"No need," she whispered.
He bowed his head slightly, then added, quietly, respectfully: "You suffered an internal infection. We had to do a Hysterectomy to save your life. I'm sorry.
She stared at the ceiling.
The flowers by the window wilted two days later. No one came to change them.
Veqty lay in silence, remembering the way Alan's hand felt on her cheek.
She had lived through something worse than death.
She had survived her family's ending.
The silence in the apartment was never complete.
There was always something—a creak in the floorboards, a gust against the windowpane, a drip from the kitchen sink that she never bothered fixing. But none of it mattered, because the only thing she truly heard anymore was her heartbeat. Dull, persistent. A pulse she never asked to keep hearing.
Veqty turned 35 one month after Alan's funeral. She didn't throw a party. She didn't even leave the house. The world outside had continued spinning, uncaring. Trains ran on schedule. People argued in cafés. Children laughed in the park across the street. And she sat by the window, counting raindrops, waiting for someone who would never come home again.
That first year was the loudest. So many voices, full of pity. Friends. Colleagues. Old classmates. They came with casserole dishes and hollow comforts.
"He would've wanted you to live.
"He's watching over you."
"You're strong."
They stopped coming by in the second year. Grief, after all, was only allowed a short lease. After that, it became something shameful — something you were meant to tuck away like an old photograph in a drawer you never opened.
Veqty never moved on. Not because she didn't try. But because she didn't want to.
She kept their wedding photo by the bedside. His coat still hung by the door. She even kept the small box of pacifiers they'd bought during her second trimester.
Every object had a voice, and they all said the same thing: the only consolation, You were loved once.
The years passed like molasses in winter. She worked remotely. Digital design. Freelance commissions. Nothing too involved. Just enough to get by.
Her sister, Martha, had moved to the Netherlands years ago. They video-called often in the early years. Then, only on holidays. Then, only when her sister's children were curious to see the "auntie with the sad eyes."
Still, Martha visited once every few years. Always a whirlwind — her accent thicker, her body older, but her spirit as irritatingly youthful as ever.
"Veq," she'd say, throwing her coat off and letting her grandchildren terrorize the house. "You need color in your life. This beige-on-gray shit is going to suck the soul right out of you."
Veqty smiled for her. She could still do that. It just never reached her eyes.
One year, when she was sixty, Martha brought a little boy named Ezra.
Ezra was six. Loud. Bright-eyed. A relentless little creature that talked in rapid bursts, as if every second of silence was a missed opportunity to impress the universe.
"Auntie, Auntie!" he chirped, waving around his tablet. "Do you know what a Nest Queen is?"
Veqty blinked. "A what?"
"Insectoid Nest Queen! From the game! They can lay like thousands of eggs and command armies, and they have these huge carapace wings and everything—look!" He shoved the screen at her.
Veqty, against her better judgment, looked.
On it was a strange alien creature, vaguely humanoid, but with curling antennae, elongated limbs, and a glossy, chitin-covered body that shimmered dark green and blue under some alien sun. It was terrifying… and elegant. The "Nest Queen" stood on a hive throne, surrounded by writhing larvae and swarming insectoids that looked like a fusion between beetles, mantises, and nightmares.
"They're not evil, though," Ezra insisted. "People think they are, but they're just doing what they're meant to do! Like… survive. And multiply. Their queen loves them, you know?"
Veqty stared a moment longer before nodding. "That's… quite a queen."
He grinned, gap-toothed and proud. "Yeah! But she's not even the strongest! There's the Swam Mother! She's ancient, and she can create Queens, and Champions, and Lords, and even whole ecosystems with her mind. Her power is mutation. She can evolve past limits. I always play with her!"
"She sounds lonely," Veqty said without thinking.
Ezra tilted his head. "Huh?"
"Being the only one at the top. It sounds… lonely."
The boy frowned, then gave a very grown-up shrug. "Maybe. But she has a whole swarm. They'd die for her. She's so cool!"
Veqty didn't reply.
Ezra grew. He visited again when he was ten, and then fifteen. Each time he brought some new version of the game—Galactic Hive Wars, Swarm Ascension Simulator, NestWorld 4. Always Insectoids. Always the Swam Mother.
Martha aged as well. Wrinkles carved deeper into her face, her hair streaked silver. But she never stopped smiling. She carried the chaos of generations with her. The laughter of children, the noise of the family.
Veqty had no such noise.
The apartment remained quiet. Her body slowed. Eventually, her legs didn't carry her as far. Then they stopped carrying her at all.
At 87, Veqty was lying in a hospital bed.
The room was white and sterile. An IV drip beeped rhythmically. Her skin was paper-thin. Her bones are frail. Her eyes… still the same gray that Alan used to call "stormy."
Martha sat beside her, older now than she ever imagined being. Her hands trembled as she poured water into a plastic cup.
"You remember Ezra?" she asked softly.
Veqty smiled faintly. "The Insectoid general."
"He's got a kid now."
"I'm older than some bloodlines, it seems."
Martha laughed, the sound tinged with tears. "Still sharp."
"Not much else left to be."
Outside, rain painted streaks across the window.
Ezra came in a moment later, now a man with tired eyes and a gentle smile. He sat beside his childhood hero and pulled out an old tablet.
"You remember her?" he asked.
He tapped the screen, and the familiar image of the Swam Mother filled it.
"She never died in the lore," he said quietly. "Just… went dormant. Waiting. She's Somewhere deep beneath the surface of a forgotten moon, lore-wise her egg has stayed still for a thousand years, it will hatch tomorrow on the company's anniversary, maybe she will finally be a playable character now!"
Veqty's eyes fluttered, heavy now.
She wanted to say something clever. A quip. A jab.
But her throat burned.
So she only whispered, "Must've been lonely."
Ezra smiled. "Not anymore."
That night, she dreamed.
She was standing in the field where they had married. Cherry blossoms drifted like snow. Alan was there, smiling, his hands in his pockets. He looked exactly as he had on their wedding day.
"You came late," he teased.
"I always do."
He took her hand. "Ready to go home?"
She looked up at him. Her storm-gray eyes finally softened.
"I never left."
The heartbeat monitor slowed.
Then, silence.
Not the cruel, hollow silence that had haunted her for five decades.
This one was warm. Quiet. Peaceful.
The ghost had finally found her way out of the house.