The mornings were the hardest.That strange silence before the city woke — when the world felt half-asleep, and so did I.
I'd lie there, staring at the ceiling, half hoping Reya would text… and half hoping she wouldn't.
Because every message from her was a dose.And I was addicted.
She had this way of speaking that felt like hypnosis — calm, deliberate, almost tender.One moment we'd be joking about something random, and the next she'd drop a line like,"Do you ever wish someone could just understand you without you having to explain?"
And I'd freeze.Because that's exactly what I wanted — and exactly what terrified me.
She was mapping me again.Like a cartographer of the soul, redrawing my weak spots.
Work didn't feel real anymore.People laughed in the break room, phones buzzed, emails piled up — all background noise.
I wasn't there.Not really.
My mind kept replaying our last conversation — her smirk, her whisper, "I'm teaching you."
Was that revenge?A lesson?Or something darker — something both of us couldn't name?
One evening, after another day spent pretending to function, I found myself walking without direction. My feet led me to a small riverside café — the kind I used to visit before my life turned into a chessboard of manipulation and masks.
I ordered black coffee. No sugar. No milk. Just bitterness — raw and honest.
As I stared at the reflection in the window, I barely recognized the man looking back.Unshaven. Tired. But worse — hollow.
That's when I realized something:Reya hadn't just entered my world.She'd become it.
I tried cutting her off.Deleted her number. Blocked her on everything.
But she was clever.
A few days later, an email came — no name, no subject. Just a line:
"You can't erase what's already inside you."
I didn't reply.But I didn't delete it either.
Weeks passed. I started drinking more. Sleeping less.And somewhere between the sleepless nights and blurred days, guilt began crawling back — not for what Reya was doing, but for everything that led to her.
Mira.The marriage.The lies.The slow, surgical way I'd dismantled her dignity in the name of "revenge."
Maybe this was the universe's way of evening the score — showing me what it felt like to be on the receiving end of quiet destruction.
Then, one night, I got a call.Reya's voice — soft, like a ghost.
"You've been quiet."
"I've been trying to forget you."
She chuckled. "How's that going?"
"Terribly."
"Good."
"Why good?"
"Because I want you to remember."
"Why?"
"Because forgetting is freedom. And you don't deserve that yet."
Her words hit like a confession and a curse at once.
"Reya," I said, trying to sound calm, "what do you want from me?"
A pause. Then, slowly —"I want you to see what you did to people who loved you."
"I already know."
"No," she whispered. "You understand it now, but you don't feel it yet."
The line went quiet. Only her breathing remained, steady and close.
Then she said something that made my chest tighten —"When you finally feel it, when it burns the same way you burned them… call me."
And the call ended.
For the first time in a long while, I cried. Not loud, not broken — just silent tears, the kind that come from realizing you've become everything you once feared.
I wanted to hate her.I wanted to hate myself more.
But beneath all that noise, a strange thought whispered —Maybe this was redemption in disguise.
Not forgiveness.Not peace.Just pain — honest, unfiltered, human pain.
And for the first time, it didn't feel like punishment.It felt like truth.
The next morning, I woke up feeling lighter. Not better — just… less heavy.
The guilt was still there, but it wasn't crushing me anymore. It was shaping me, carving out the person I'd buried under layers of pride and control.
And though I didn't admit it out loud, I knew Reya had succeeded.Not in breaking me —But in showing me that I was never really whole to begin with.