Author: Byte Journalist

Birthdays are supposed to be full of joy, but that day, mine was tangled with anxiety. Emma had just turned nine, and I wanted to give her a birthday that would make her feel special. Since her father left, I’d made it my mission to make every year memorable, even if it meant working extra shifts at the diner or skipping a few meals myself. This year, she’d fallen in love with a picture of a unicorn cake she’d seen in a shop window months earlier—white frosting, a shimmering rainbow mane, a golden horn. She’d pressed her face to the…

 Waking up with aches and pains isn’t always about aging or poor sleep—it could be your morning routine. According to Dr. Palleti Siva Karthik Reddy, an internal medicine specialist at Koshys Hospital in India, certain seemingly harmless habits may be contributing to your discomfort. Here are five habits to watch out for: 1. Poor Sleeping Posture Sleeping on your stomach or without proper pillow support can misalign your spine and stiffen your joints. A study in the Journal of Physical Therapy Science found that imbalanced sleep posture increases the risk of chronic pain. Fix it: Sleep on your side or…

When people ask how we met, I always smile, because it still feels like a scene from a romantic film.It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon, and I had ducked into a quiet little café near my office. The place smelled of cinnamon and coffee beans. I ordered a latte and a slice of carrot cake, and while I waited at my table, a tall, kind-eyed man placed a cup in front of me. “Here’s your cappuccino,” he said warmly. I looked up, puzzled. “I ordered a latte.” He glanced at the cup, laughed softly, and apologized. “Looks like I’ve stolen…

The room smelled faintly of lilies and candle wax. A hush lay over everything, broken only by muffled sobs and the slow creak of chairs as people shifted in their seats. In the center of the room stood the coffin — gleaming white, draped in soft folds of satin. Inside lay a young woman who, not long ago, had been the life of every gathering. Her hair, chestnut brown and still silky, framed a face that looked more like someone in a deep, peaceful sleep than someone gone forever. Her name was Sophie Bennett. Twenty-four years old. Bright, witty, endlessly…

Since her father’s passing, Sophie had become little more than a shadow in her own home—tolerated, but never truly welcome. Her stepmother, Margaret, was cold and calculating, obsessed with appearances and her social standing. Though Margaret had inherited everything from Sophie’s late father, she could never accept that Sophie—warm-hearted, graceful, and quietly admired by many—still lived under her roof. Determined to strip Sophie of her dignity, Margaret devised a cruel plan: she would marry the girl off to a pauper. Not just any pauper, but a shabby drifter Margaret had spotted loitering near the marketplace—clothes in tatters, hair unkempt, the…

Louis Newman thrived on control. Control over schedules. Over meetings. Over every variable that might slow him down. That morning, as he boarded his flight to New York, he felt smug satisfaction seeing his name neatly printed on the boarding pass for 4A — a business class aisle seat with enough room for his laptop, his notes, and the three-hour Zoom call he was about to host with Shanghai investors. Perfect. He stowed his bag, slipped off his jacket, and began arranging his little traveling command center: laptop, chargers, documents, pen, phone set to Do Not Disturb. In his mind,…

Almost 24 years after the 9/11 terr0rist attacks, three victims have been identified through DNA analysis. In 2001, four coordinated terr0rist attacks were carried out by Islamist extremist group Al-Qaeda. The terr0rists flew two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers in New York and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the hijackers. It remains the deadliest terr0rist attack to date. Sadly, not everyone who perished in the horrific attacks have been identified. Of the 2,976 who lost their lives, around 1,100 victims remain unidentified, around 40 percent.…

The storm came without warning. One moment the road was a ribbon between gold fields, the next it was a dark seam stitched through low clouds and a hard, slanting rain. The first cold splashes hit my windshield like thrown pebbles; the rest arrived as a sheet. The wipers smacked back and forth in protest. I eased off the gas and peered into the gray—just looking for a shoulder, a farmhouse, any place to pull over until the world regained its shape. That was when I saw the spire. It rose behind a hedge of ivy and iron, a slate…

The Return of Hope: A New Beginning for Tamara and Konstantin Tamara never thought she would have to fight for her own life while the man she once trusted planned for her death. Dmitry, her husband, refused to pay for the surgery that could save her. Instead, he went as far as choosing a burial plot for her in the cemetery before disappearing on a long voyage with his mistress. For a time, Tamara believed her story would end there—silently, in pain, and forgotten. But life had other plans. And one of those plans arrived in the form of Konstantin,…

The bus stop at the corner of Willow and 3rd had its own weather. On summer mornings the leaves wove sunlight into lace on the pavement. In winter, steam from the bakery across the street drifted like a warm sigh around the glass shelter. It was a small, ordinary place—three seats, a route map with corners curling, a dented trash can—and yet the people of Maplebridge had come to expect a kind of quiet ritual there. Every weekday at 8:15 a.m., Mrs. Ada Whitaker arrived in her blue wool coat, even in the heat, because the coat had pockets exactly…