But my brain, unhelpfully, had already composed a comprehensive list of reasons for Mark’s silence:
1.He was trapped under heavy machinery with no access to his phone.
2.He’d read my message and found it so bizarre he was currently showing it to all his friends at a bar.
3.He’d been kidnapped by international ladder thieves.
4.He was deliberately ignoring me because who texts someone about library ladders?
5.He was crafting the perfect response, and perfection takes time.
Number five seemed the least likely.
I scrambled my eggs with more aggression than they deserved, occasionally glancing at my stubbornly silent phone. By the time I’d finished eating and washing up, checking my phone had evolved from casual glance to compulsive ritual.
“This is ridiculous,” I announced to my empty apartment. “I am a grown woman obsessing over a text to your neighbor about a ladder.”
My bookshelves offered no counterargument.
I settled onto my small sofa with my current read—a surprisingly engaging history of medieval manuscripts—but found myself reading the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word. The quiet of my apartment seemed to amplify the absence of notification sounds.
Five minutes later, I was pacing.
“He’s just busy,” I told Ferdinand the fern. “Or maybe he doesn’t have his phone.” Ferdinand drooped slightly, either in agreement or silent judgment of my deteriorating composure.
Another circuit of my living room. Another glance at my phone. Another entirely rational explanation for Mark’s silence—he’d fallen into a spontaneous coma.
“This is why you don’t have a social life, Clara,” I muttered. “You’re incapable of sending a normal text without spiraling into catastrophic overthinking.”
The problem wasn’t just the silence. It was the doubt now creeping in about the text itself. Had it been too forward? Too desperate? Too emoji-laden? Had I crossed some invisible line in neighbor-to-neighbor communication protocol?
I flopped back onto the sofa, dragging a throw pillow over my face. “Social suicide via text message. Not my finest moment.”
My phone buzzed.
I launched off the couch so violently that I knocked over a stack of library journals I’d been meaning to read for months. Scrambling for my phone, I nearly dropped it twice before finally steadying my hands enough to check the screen.
One new message from “Mark (Hot Neighbor)”.
Just one character: a period. A single, solitary dot.
“.”
I stared at it, my brain temporarily unable to process this minimalist response. What did it mean? Was it an accident? A typo? The beginning of a longer message that got cut off? A deliberate punctuation mark designed to plunge me into existential uncertainty?
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked my empty apartment. “A period? A period?”
I flopped back onto the couch, staring at the ceiling as my internal monologue spiraled into increasingly absurd interpretations.
Maybe it’s code. Maybe “.” means “Yes, I have many ladders, I’ll bring them all.” Or maybe it means “Stop texting me about ladders, you weirdo.” Maybe he’s using Morse code, and this is just the beginning of an elaborate message. Maybe his cat sat on his phone. Maybe “.” is what the cool kids say now instead of “k” and I’m just painfully out of touch.
Before I could concoct any more far-fetched theories, my phone buzzed again. Same contact.
Who is this? And what exactly makes your boss “bullheaded”?
My heart sank. I’d definitely misdialed. This wasn’t Mark. This was a stranger who was now justifiably confused about why someone was texting them about ladder emergencies and bullheaded bosses. My hands felt clammy as I considered the implications. I’d just sent a rambling, unprofessional text about my employer to a total stranger. A stranger who was now asking for details. What if they somehow knew Mrs. Wilson? What if word got back to her that her librarian was calling her names to random people?
I took a deep breath and typed out a reply, attempting to strike a balance between apologetic and not-sounding-like-a-potential-stalker:
