I stared at it. The screen cracked at the corner. A line spiderwebbed down the side like a fracture in glass you can feel before you see.
I didn’t breathe.
I picked it up slowly. Like it might hurt me. Like it already had. My thumb hovered over the power button. It was warm. Not from use. From memory.
I closed my hand around it. Carried it to the nightstand. Plugged it in. The cord trembled slightly as I pushed it into place. I watched the battery icon flicker to life. Twenty percent. Then thirty. Then the screen lit fully. She hadn’t changed her wallpaper.
It was still the photo I’d taken of her in the passenger seat of my car. Hair a mess. Eyes laughing. Lips parted. It didn’t look like a girl in love.It looked like a girl who finally believed she was safe.
The first notification flashed across the screen.
Missed call.
Missed call.
Missed call.
Then a message icon.
Not received.
Drafted.
I touched it. The text opened. Only one line.I love you. I’m sorry I made you trust me.
My knees gave before my rage did. I sat on the edge of the bed, phone in one hand, the other gripping the collar I hadn’t put on her.
I stared at the words. I read them once. Twice. And then I let them echo. Because she hadn’t sent it.
She hadn’t given me the chance to reply. Because somewhere between loving me and leaving the room, she had decided it was her burden to carry. Her fault to own.
I rubbed my thumb across the screen. The words blurred. Not from the glass. From the water I didn’t feel leave my eyes. I hadn’t cried in years. Not since Camille.
Not since her fingers went cold in mine and I realized love was just another way to bury someone you weren’t willing to let go. But now? Now the weight felt different.
It felt like someone had handed me her heart still beating and told me to keep it safe—and I hadn’t even noticed when it stopped.
I looked down at the screen again. The message stared back. Not a question. Not a confession. A farewell.
I opened a new message. Typed her name. The cursor blinked.
I couldn’t find the words. There weren’t any left that she hadn’t already given me. So I let it sit there. An unfinished answer to a message never sent.
I turned the phone over. Laid it face down on the bed. Stood. If they thought they could unmake her—they hadn’t seen what I looked like when I remembered how to feel.
And now?
Now I was feeling everything.
The table wasn’t meant to be a table. It was meant to be weight.
The kind of weight you gather in one place when the rest of the world has stopped listening. It sat in the center of the room like a reckoning, the same one we’d used to map Camille’s murder, to erase enemies, to draw a line between empire and extinction.
Tonight it was bare. For now.
I dragged Camille’s journal from my bedroom. My fingers didn’t shake, but the space between my breaths did. I carried it like it was fragile. Like it had weight she left for me to break.
I set it down. The pages fluttered. A whisper. Like she was still breathing somewhere between the lines.
