The apartment was silent, except for the low hum of the ceiling fan.
It wasn't silence in the way most people thought of it — not peaceful, not calm. It was the sort of silence that pressed into the skin, that filled every inch of the room like a slow-moving gas. Even the coffee on the desk had stopped steaming, its surface cooling to a dull, lifeless sheen.
He sat motionless in the middle of it all, spine perfectly straight in his chair, one hand on the mouse, the other resting flat on the desk like a dead thing.
The laptop screen glowed against his face, bleaching him out in pale blue.
A video was playing.
Her video.
The same one. Again.
Her laugh — that half-second breath before it really began — looped in his mind like a tick in a clock. He knew when her eyes would flick to the side, when her fingers would tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, when she would lean forward just enough for the sunlight to catch in her hair.
Three months of watching.
Three months of repetition so absolute that he had stopped watching to remember her and started watching because… what else was there to do?
He was more machine than man now, each click as precise as the last. The folders were muscle memory. Open. Scroll. Select. Play. Repeat.
The room could have been black and white for all he knew — maybe it was his vision, maybe it was the past itself draining the color from him. The only real movement came from the curtain breathing against the window in slow, shallow pulls.
In this narrow space, he existed like clockwork.
The laptop fan. The chair creak. The coffee cooling.
And her.
Always her.
But tonight — for no reason he could name — something caught.
It happened mid-sentence.
She was telling a story; he already knew every word before she said it. He mouthed them along with her, the sound almost in sync.
Only…
"So then Arven—"
The name hit like a wrong note in a song he'd heard too many times to mishear.
Arven?
No, she'd never said that. She'd said "so then I ran" — he was sure of it. He'd heard it a hundred, maybe a thousand times. He'd felt it imprint in his brain until it was a permanent mark.
His jaw tightened. He didn't move otherwise.
He replayed it. Again. Again.
"So then Arven—"
Every time, the name was there.
Every time, she was looking straight at the camera when she said it. Straight at him.
The tiniest curl of her lips followed, too subtle to be called a smile.
The air in the apartment felt heavier. The fan sounded wrong. The curtain shifted with the wind, slow, like something was deciding whether to come inside.
Had she always been looking at him like that?
Had she ever looked at him like that?
He clicked to the next video. And the next.
Now the word was everywhere. Sliding into places it had never belonged.
Like it had always been there, just waiting for him to notice.
The eyes that had memorized her face were lying to him.
The ears that had replayed her voice were lying, too.
Even the memory he'd sworn was unshakable had betrayed him.
Everything in the room was the same.
The coffee cold.
The curtain breathing.
The glow on his face.
But the videos weren't.
The past wasn't.
And for the first time, he wasn't sure his own eyes had ever been telling him the truth.