Drowning In Bitterness - (2) The Silence
Part 2 of 7 - TOC
The Silence
For the next hour, she moved frantically between screens: phone, laptop, phone, laptop. She closed tabs, only to force them open again immediately. She monitored the view count as it ticked upward—or rather, it didn’t actually “tick.” It merely reflected her own refreshes. In the old days, personal homepages had those counters showing the number of visits; it was exactly the same now. Just as easy to manipulate. She might as well have taken a ballpoint pen and written the numbers directly onto a sheet of paper.
01:48: 37 views.
02:11: 49 views. 1 like.
02:32: 61 views.
Finally, a comment appeared. The profile picture belonged to a stranger: a mild smile, a plant in the background—the kind of person who is supposed to represent something they aren’t. “Who hurt you?”
She laughed—a short bark. Then the laughter thinned out and died away. There was no one there to hear it anyway.
The next ping arrived. She froze. A DM from Matt—someone who used to send her his drafts. Someone who had once said, with the utmost gravity: I trust your eye.
Matt: Are you okay?
Matt: Did you mean to tag Vane like that?
“I didn’t tag him,” she whispered at the screen, as if the mere intention could wash it away. Like a politician caught in a lie, denying everything because the journalists never listen anyway—they only report what they see.
She wrote back far too quickly.
Relax. It’s a review. People are so incredibly thin-skinned.
Three dots appeared. Stopped. Appeared again. Matt’s reply landed with the hollow thud of a closing door.
Matt: He’s seen it.
As if she hadn’t noticed. As if the word “Seen” wasn’t already burned into her retinas.
She refreshed the page again. The receipt was there—small, ghostly, and completely undisturbed. Like Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, haunted by chains. But this was different. This was being haunted by indifference.
The first sense of emptiness made its arrival, small but razor-sharp: She had baited the hook with her finest cruelty, and Vane hadn’t even bothered to bite.
He had simply stepped away from the water’s edge.