The "send" button was a point of no return. In the seconds after I clicked it, a strange, electric buzz filled my veins—a mixture of terror and accomplishment. But as the minutes stretched into an hour, the buzz faded, replaced by the familiar, heavy silence of my apartment. The waiting began.
Waiting, I learned, is its own special kind of purgatory. It's a state of suspended animation where time warps. Every minute stretches into an eternity of self-doubt, and every hour is an opportunity to replay every mistake you've ever made. My laptop, which had been a tool of empowerment an hour ago, was now a potential vessel of rejection. My email inbox became the singular focus of my world. Every notification, every spam email, every buzz of my phone sent a jolt of panic through my system.
I spent the next day in this limbo. I tried to sketch, but my lines were shaky and uninspired. I tried to clean, but I would stop mid-scrub to check my phone. The hope I had felt was a fragile seedling, and the silence was a frost threatening to kill it. I was a scientist staring at a petri dish, desperate for any sign of life, but seeing nothing but a sterile void. The lack of a response felt like a verdict in itself: my application, my arrow shot into the dark, had simply disappeared without a sound.
By the second day, I had convinced myself it was hopeless. The brief surge of confidence I'd felt was a fluke. I was the quiet girl with the mediocre portfolio. Of course they hadn't replied. I was just another unread file in a mountain of better, brighter candidates. I was drinking my now-customary cup of peppermint tea—the taste no longer defiant, just bland—when a knock echoed from the front door.
My entire body went rigid. No one knocked on my door. Not anymore. Pizza was delivered with a buzz from downstairs. Packages were left in the lobby. The only person who ever knocked was…
My heart hammered against my ribs as I crept towards the door, peering through the peephole. It was her.
Seraphina. She was standing there, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, looking impatient. She wasn't looking at the door, but at her phone, her thumb scrolling rapidly. She was wearing the same leather jacket from the photo, and the light from the hallway caught the silver hoops in her ears. She looked impossibly alive, impossibly vibrant, a creature from another, brighter world trespassing on the threshold of my gray existence.
I felt a hundred emotions at once: rage, grief, a pathetic, gut-wrenching flicker of hope. Maybe she was here to apologize. Maybe she'd realized her mistake. Maybe—
I opened the door.
She looked up from her phone, her eyes widening in mild surprise, as if she hadn't really expected me to be here. "Oh. Hey, Ellie."
Her voice. It was the same, yet different. Casual. Distant. There was no warmth in it. My fantasy of a tearful reunion dissolved into the harsh, fluorescent light of the hallway.
"Sera," I managed to say. My own voice sounded rusty, foreign.
"Sorry to just show up like this," she said, not sounding sorry at all. She took a half-step back, creating more space between us. "I know it's weird. But I'm in a huge jam. Liam and I are applying for this new place, and the agent is being a total nightmare about documentation. I can't find my birth certificate anywhere. I think it might be in the old filing box we kept in the back of the closet."
The words hit me like individual stones. Liam and I. A new place. She wasn't here for me. She was here for a piece of paper, a bureaucratic key to the next chapter of the life she was building without me. I was not a person she was visiting; I was a storage unit she needed to access.
"Oh," was all I could say. I felt my face go blank, a mask of numbness descending to protect whatever was left of my heart.
"Yeah," she sighed, running a hand through her hair. A faint, unfamiliar scent drifted from her—something floral and expensive, not the lavender we used to share. "So, could I just... grab it? It'll take two seconds."
I stepped aside wordlessly and gestured towards the closet. She strode past me, her boots clicking on the floorboards. The sound was an intrusion, a violation of the quiet sanctuary of my solitude. She moved with purpose, opening the closet and immediately finding the small, gray box on the top shelf. She didn't look around. She didn't comment on the state of the apartment. She didn't acknowledge the invisible ghosts of our shared past that were screaming in every corner.
She found the document within seconds, tucking it into her purse. "Found it. Perfect. Thanks, Ellie, you're a lifesaver."
Lifesaver. The word she used to use when I'd finish a design for her at the last minute, or when I'd make her coffee just the way she liked it. Now it was for this. For handing over a piece of paper.
She was already at the door again, her car keys jingling in her hand. "Alright, I gotta run. Talk to you later."
It was a lie. We both knew it. There would be no 'later.'
She was gone. The door clicked shut, leaving me in the echo of her presence. The foreign scent of her perfume lingered in the air. I stood frozen in the middle of the living room, my fragile progress of the last two days completely annihilated. The seedling of hope was crushed. My world, which had started to feel infinitesimally bigger, had shrunk back to the size of this room, this heartbreak.
I looked at my silent phone on the counter, the dream of a new job now seeming like a child's fantasy. I was a fool to think I could just move on.
And then, as if summoned by the sheer force of my despair, the phone buzzed.
It lit up, a stark white rectangle against the dim counter. An email. My breath caught in my throat. I recognized the sender line wasn't a social media notification. It wasn't spam. It was a name, followed by an address.
h.chapman@blackwoodpress.com