Chapter 15: The Digital Return
The phone, when she finally powered it on, didn’t just buzz. It erupted. A convulsive, shuddering seizure of light and sound in the palm of her hand. Notifications piled atop one another—a frantic, digital Tower of Babel built from emojis, concerned question marks, and Lydia’s increasingly unhinged previews of brand manager emails.
Dee stood in the cold morning quiet of the rebuilt greenhouse, the scent of fresh-cut cedar and damp peat moss thick in the air. She let the device have its fit. She watched the numbers on her Instagram icon blur from 99+ into oblivion. A part of her, the part trained over ten years, itched to dive in, to curate, to manage the reaction. That part felt like a phantom limb, twitching.
She swiped it all away. Every single notification. A clean, terrifying sweep.
Her hands were different. Nails short, a line of grime permanently etched under the index finger. Scratches from wire and wood mapped a new geography across her skin. She opened the camera, flipped it to selfie mode.
The face that filled the screen was a stranger. Tired. A smudge of soil on one cheekbone. Her curls were a wild, frizzy corona escaping a practical bun, strands stuck to her neck with sweat. But her eyes, those honey-brown eyes she’d filtered and widened and enhanced a thousand times, were clear. Almost alarmingly so.
She hit record.
The video was shaky. She panned slowly from her face, out through the new, pristine polycarbonate panels of the greenhouse, across the frosted field beyond where the cows stood like statues in the low dawn light. She brought the camera back to herself.
“Hey.” Her voice was rough, unused to this performance. “So. I’m alive.” A small, crooked smile. “My aunt’s greenhouse is… well, it’s standing. Which is a miracle. I owe you all a makeover once the bench is in, so. Hang tight.”
She turned the camera, finding Ruth where she was methodically sorting seedling trays, her back to them. Dee walked over, wrapped an arm around her aunt’s thick waist, and rested her chin on Ruth’s shoulder. Ruth jolted, then scowled into the lens.
“What in the Sam Hill is this? Are you filming me? I look like a burlap sack full of apples.”
“She’s the real visionary,” Dee said to the camera, her smile turning genuine. Ruth’s gruffness was solid ground.
“I’m a realist with a circular saw and a deep distrust of technology. Get that thing out of my face.” But Ruth didn’t shove her off. She held up a tiny, perfect seedling of rosemary. “This is the content. Life. In spite of everything.”
Dee ended the story with a quick, loud kiss on Ruth’s leathery cheek, captured Ruth’s subsequent grumble, and posted it. Just like that. No filter. No caption. No poll asking which plant she should get. She tossed the phone onto the new workbench like it was a hot coal.
“Feel better?” Ruth asked, not looking up from her trays.
“I feel sick.”
“Good. Means you’re not numb anymore.”
They worked in silence for an hour, the only sounds the scratch of labels being written, the clatter of terracotta pots. The composure was a thin shell. Every cell in Dee’s body was screaming at her to check the phone. To see the validation, the speculation, the hate, the love. To feed the machine.
Finally, she cracked. A quick, furtive glance.
The story had over half a million views. The comments were a waterfall.
DEE! Oh my god we thought you were DEAD!!
You look amazing?? That glow is unreal.
Is that a real farm? Is this a collab with like, FarmFresh?
Who is that adorable witch and does she have a TikTok?
Lowkey looks like you’re in witness protection babe.
Matt’s liked your story.
The last one was a bare sentence, three words, that punched the air from her lungs. She stared. His username, right there, amid the chaos. A simple, silent heart. It meant nothing. It meant everything. It was a casual gesture he’d done a thousand times. A reflex. But now, after the silence, it felt like a flare shot across a dark sea.
Her thumb hovered over his icon. One tap. She could see if he’d posted. If he was with Elara. If his life looked perfect.
“Don’t.”
Ruth’s voice was quiet. Dee flinched, guilty.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t go picking at the wound just when it starts to scab over. You’re here. Be here. The soil is here. Your hands are here. That…” she nodded at the phone, “that is a ghost. Let it haunt someone else for a minute.”
Dee set the phone down, screen-first. Her heart hammered against her ribs. The urge was physical, a craving.
She spent the afternoon attacking a stubborn, frozen patch of earth for a new compost bin, the axe splitting the ground with satisfying, jarring thuds. She focused on the burn in her shoulders, the cloud of her breath in the cold air. But his name, that tiny digital heart, pulsed behind her eyes with every swing.
By evening, she was raw, physically spent. Ruth had gone inside. The farm was swallowed by a deep, velvet blue dusk, the first sharp stars pinpricking the sky.
Alone on the porch steps, she gave in.
She opened his profile. His last post was from four days ago. A shot of the salon’s new neon sign, reflected in a rainy sidewalk. No caption. She scanned it, her analyst’s eye noting the lower engagement, the comments from clients asking where she was. Elara wasn’t tagged. There was no sign of her at all.
It meant nothing.
She was about to close the app when a direct message notification popped up.
Not a comment. A DM.
From him.
The preview text was just two words: Hey, you.
The world narrowed to the glowing rectangle. The cold of the step seeped through her jeans. The distant hoot of an owl was the only sound.
She didn’t open it. She watched it sit there, a sealed envelope containing a potential grenade or a lifeline. Her breath came shallow. This was the cliff edge. Opening it would be stepping back into the current. It would give the ghost a voice.
She could delete it. She could pretend she never saw it. She could wait a week, reply with something casual and breezy.
The night wind cut through her sweater. She thought of the collapsed greenhouse, the satisfying crack of rotten wood giving way, the clear space it left for something new.
Her thumb, almost of its own volition, tapped the message.
It opened.
Hey, you. Saw your story. You look… different. Good different. The greenhouse looks incredible. Listen, I know you’re off the grid or whatever. But when you get this… call me. It’s important. It’s not about hair.
Below that, his personal phone number, which she already knew by heart. And then, a final, simple line that made her blood stop, then thunder in her ears.
It’s about us.
The words It’s about us glowed on the screen, three syllables that collapsed the sturdy world she’d been building for a week. The frost-rimed field, the solid cedar frames, the honest ache in her muscles—all of it suddenly felt like a stage set. A pretty backdrop for a different, more painful drama.
Off the grid or whatever.
The casual phrase scraped against her nerves. It reduced her deliberate, difficult silence to a trendy lapse in service. It made her seem petulant instead of purposeful. A hot, sharp anger flashed through the cold shock, burning it clean.
She didn’t answer.
She deleted the entire message thread, his number, every trace. It was a violent, decisive gesture. The phone felt toxic in her hand now, a conduit for a past life that insisted on haunting her present. She shoved it deep into the pocket of her work coat, as if burying evidence.
The next morning, a beat-up truck rattled into the yard, discharging a whirlwind of neighbors come to help set the new greenhouse benches. Among them was Alex, the local pottery instructor whose kiln Ruth sometimes used. He was all easy smiles and competent hands, his flannel shirt rolled to his elbows despite the chill.
Dee watched him lift a heavy timber alone, the muscles in his forearms corded. He laughed at something Ruth said, a sound that was open and uncomplicated. An idea, cold and clear, formed in her mind.
She needed to prove something—to Matt, to Lydia, to herself. She needed to reclaim her space, her narrative. She needed to perform normalcy until it felt real again.
After lunch, as Alex was brushing sawdust from his hands, she approached him. Her heart was a practiced, professional metronome. “Hey. Alex, right?”
“That’s me,” he said, wiping his palm on his jeans before offering it. His hand was warm, rough with calluses.
“I’m Dee. Ruth’s niece.” She gestured vaguely with her phone. “I do hair, but I also make content for social media. I was wondering if I could film a quick bit with you? For my followers. Show them the community effort here.”
He looked puzzled, then shrugged. “Sure, I guess? What do you need me to do?”
“Just talk to me about the wood. Why we used cedar. Look at the camera sometimes, not at me.” She switched to her professional voice, the one that was all smooth warmth and inclusive energy. “Don’t worry, I’ll edit it. It’ll be fun.”
She filmed it in three takes. Alex was endearingly awkward, explaining the rot-resistant properties of cedar while squinting into her front-facing camera. She asked him questions, her laugh a bright, edited sound she hadn’t used in weeks. She stood close enough for the frame to look collaborative, intimate even.
It was a perfect, minute-long clip of rustic authenticity. It was also a complete fabrication.
That evening, she edited it on her phone, adding a cheerful filter that softened the edges and made their work look sun-dappled. The caption was breezy: Community is everything. Huge thanks to the amazing local talent (looking at you, Alex!) for helping my aunt and me bring this greenhouse dream back to life. Swipe to see the before—it was a literal disaster! #Rebuild #GreenhouseGoals #UpstateNY
She posted it and immediately set her phone face down on the quilt.
The familiar, anxious itch to check the likes and comments crept up her spine. She ignored it. She focused instead on the tangible reality of the quilt’s pattern under her fingers, the solid weight of it.
This was the re-entry. This was the price of her platform. She had just used a kind, unsuspecting man as a prop in a silent argument with someone three thousand miles away. The victory felt hollow and tinny, a cheap vibration where her sternum should be.
Outside, the cows shifted in their paddock. A real sound. A real world. She had one foot back in the glittering digital stream, and the current was already pulling, cold and insistent. She had done what she needed to do. She had posted. Now she had to wait and see what, or who, it dragged back to her.