I think it's because both "silence" and "cable" are nouns, so it might seem to some readers that those are what you are comparing, as opposed to "stretched" and "cable." So if you were to change it, you might want to compare verb to verb.

But I read it the way you intended and had to really think for awhile as to why she would have read it any differently. The noun vs. verb thing was all I could come up with.

HTH!