Chapter 1 – The Quiet Cage
By morning, Selene looked like the kind of woman who had everything under control. Her hair smoothed into place, her clothes pressed and muted, she carried herself with a composure that inspired trust. Colleagues admired her professionalism, patients leaned on her steadiness, strangers sometimes mistook her silence for confidence. It was easier that way — to let people think calm was her nature, not her armor.
But beneath the surface, Selene's calm was brittle. It wasn't serenity, but survival. Years of being the mediator in her parents' cold and chaotic home had taught her to keep her voice soft, her expression neutral, her anger swallowed before it could burn her alive. She had become a master at appearing unshaken, but inside she was still the child who had learned that her feelings didn't matter — only her usefulness.
In her apartment, the mask slipped. She kept everything clean, almost obsessively so, but there was one imperfection she could never bring herself to erase: a photograph, hidden in the back of her desk drawer. She never displayed it, never spoke of it, but sometimes late at night she would pull it out, her fingers tracing the edges as if to anchor herself. The photo showed her as a teenager, protective arm wrapped around her little sister. Behind them, blurred in the frame, their parents were caught mid-shout, mouths twisted in anger. Selene hated the picture, yet it was the truest snapshot of her life — the girl who had learned to shield her sister from storms no one shielded her from.
She had secrets no one in her polished world knew. Chief among them was the habit that kept her from unraveling: writing to strangers online. Always anonymously, always in fragments. She never posted cheerful updates or curated images, only confessions she could never voice aloud:
I'm so good at listening that I've forgotten how to be heard.
Sometimes I wonder if I even know who I am, or if I only exist in other people's crises.
If I vanished, would anyone care beyond obligation?
Selene never expected answers. Yet the act of releasing her words into the void felt like breathing underwater — fragile, stolen, but necessary. And when someone did reply, even if it was a stranger's fleeting words, she found herself reading them over and over, pretending for a moment that someone saw her.
Her surface life looked steady, but her nights told the truth: Selene Vale was a woman held together by silence, secrets, and the desperate hope that maybe, somewhere, someone might listen back.