Chapter 1: Late Night Confessions
The apartment was quiet, a hollowed-out kind of quiet that made the hum of the laptop fan sound like a distant highway. Dee’s thumb scrolled absently through a newsfeed, the blue light etching lines into her retinas. She wasn’t reading. She was waiting. A framed photo on the white shelf was just a dark smudge in her peripheral vision, the faces inside it blurred by time and deliberate neglect.
Her phone, facedown on the desk, buzzed against the wood.
A single, solid vibration.
Her breath hitched, just slightly. She made herself count to five—a stupid, superstitious habit—before flipping it over.
The screen glared in the dim room. A notification from the app. The one with the plain gray icon. No name, no profile picture. Just a string of server numbers and him.
Unknown: I missed you.
Four days of radio silence. Four days where she’d told herself it was a game that had run its course, a digital phantom that had vanished back into the ether. She’d even deleted the app twice, only to reinstall it in a weak, furious moment at 3 AM. The re-download felt like a defeat. Now, looking at those three words, the defeat curdled into something warm and treacherous in her chest.
She typed, deleted, typed again. Her fingers, which could fly across a keyboard filing a story on a city council corruption scandal, felt clumsy.
Dee: That’s a dangerous thing to admit.
The reply was almost instant.
Unknown: Why?
Dee: Because I might have missed you, too. And then where would we be?
She leaned back in her chair, the leather creaking. The apartment felt different now. The shadows from the floor lamp seemed deeper, the clutter on her desk more intimate. The half-empty coffee cup was a relic from a past life, ten minutes ago.
Unknown: Somewhere interesting. I’ve been thinking about your voice.
That stopped her. They’d never exchanged audio. It was all text, a river of black words on a pale screen. They’d talked about everything—the sterile smell of hospital corridors, the way light breaks through stained glass, the specific weight of guilt. He was startlingly perceptive. He never asked what she did for a living; he seemed to piece it together from the fragments she let slip about deadlines and sources and the ethical knots she spent her days untying.
Dee: You don’t know my voice.
Unknown: I imagine it. Lower than you’d think. A little rough when you’re tired. You clear your throat when you’re choosing your words carefully.
She did that. She brought her fingers to her neck, as if she could feel the truth of his guess vibrating there.
Dee: You’re projecting.
Unknown: Always. What do you imagine?
The air in the room grew thick. This was the ledge they kept walking up to, the one she usually stepped back from with a clever line. Tonight, the silence of the apartment pressed in, and the memory of the last four empty days was too fresh. She felt a reckless pull in her gut, the same one that made her agree to meet a nervous whistleblower in a deserted parking garage.
Dee: Your hands. I think about your hands.
She sent it before she could reason the impulse away. The cursor blinked, a steady, mocking pulse. She put the phone down, stood up, walked to the window. The city glittered, a circuit board of cold, distant lights. No reply. She’d killed it. She’d been too much, too real. She pressed her forehead to the cool glass.
The phone buzzed again from the desk. One long, two short.
She didn’t run. She made herself walk back, pick it up slowly.
Unknown: Tell me.
Not a rejection. A command. A plea. Her mouth went dry.
Dee: Capable. Not soft. There’s a scar, maybe, across the knuckle of your right thumb. You use them to explain things when you talk, even when no one can see you.
Another pause. Longer this time.
Unknown: There is a scar. How did you…?
Dee: I didn’t. I just see you clearly.
It was the most vulnerable thing she’d ever sent him. More than any confession about loneliness or professional despair. This was a window into her own mind, the workshop where she built him from spare parts and intuition. She was giving him the blueprint.
Unknown: My name is Matt.
She stared at the message. The anonymity had been their membrane, their safety. Names made things real. Names had histories, jobs, social media trails, obligations. Names could be found. A sharp, journalistic instinct fired in her brain, the part that knew how to cross-reference a name with a property record, a business license. She silenced it. For once, she didn’t want to investigate. She wanted to receive.
Dee: I’m Dee.
Matt: Dee.
Seeing her name in his text, in his context, was profoundly strange. It looked different. It felt different.
Dee: Just Dee.
Matt: Just Matt. For now.
The ‘for now’ hung between them, a promise and a threat. The dynamic had shifted. The phantom had a name. The game had stakes. The quiet in the apartment was no longer hollow; it was charged, expectant. She could feel her own pulse in her fingertips where they gripped the phone.
Matt: It’s late. You should sleep, Dee.
Dee: I won’t.
Matt: I know. But one of us should be responsible.
He signed off. The app went dark. She was left in the lamplight, the city’s glow at her back, with the echo of a name in the silent room. Matt. It was a common name. A solid name. It didn’t tell her anything, and yet it told her everything.
She didn’t move for a long time. Then, slowly, almost ceremoniously, she opened her laptop. She opened a fresh browser tab. Her fingers hovered over the keys.
Just a search. One simple search. It didn’t mean anything. It was just what she did. She gathered facts. She solved mysteries.
She typed ‘M’ and then backspaced, closing the tab with a sharp click. Not yet. The curiosity was a live wire, but the intimacy—the raw, surprising honesty of the last hour—was a fragile, new thing. She wouldn’t autopsy it tonight.
Instead, she got up, turned off the lamp, and lay on the couch in the dark. Behind her eyelids, she didn’t see a face. She saw hands. Capable hands, moving in the dark, explaining something only she could understand.