Morning
The light filters pale and gold through the curtains, soft as forgiveness.
For once, I let it touch me.
I move slow. Coffee, a slice of toast I don’t finish, hair pulled back into something resembling order. The world feels fragile, but I step into it anyway.
Outside, the air is crisp, the sun stretching over rooftops like it’s trying to start again.
I walk instead of drive needing the air, the small slice of Vitamin D, the rhythm of my steps on cracked pavement.
By the time the city comes alive around me, engines chatter, the smell of roasted coffee and asphalt rises, and I almost feel human again.
Almost.
And by the time I reach the building’s glass doors, I’ve stitched the smile back onto my face.
The one that says I’m fine.
The one no one ever questions.
Inside, the elevator hums softly as it climbs.
I stare at my reflection in the mirrored walls calm, composed, unbreakable.
A lie I’ve perfected.
My mind drifts to the feature I’m supposed to be writing the story of the digital age, a deep dive into deception, curated perfection, and all the lies we feed each other online.
But I can’t find the pulse of it.
Not today.
Every thought feels waterlogged, heavy, slipping through my fingers before I can shape it into anything worth saying.
I’m exhausted not just tired but hollowed out.
And I don’t even know what from.
Maybe it’s everything.
The husband who left but still lingers like smoke.
The dating app that flashes across my phone like fireworks in November, each ping a false spark of connection I pretend not to need.
The mail guy the one I can’t stop thinking about, whose voice sticks to my ribs like a song I half-remember. There’s something in him I recognize, though I can’t name it.
And then there’s Carrie my best friend, my boss, the queen of this glass tower. The woman who built an empire out of grit and ambition while I’m just…trying to breathe in its shadow.
The elevator keeps climbing, smooth and relentless.
The mirrored walls close in, gleaming and cold, and for a heartbeat, I swear I can feel them pressing against my chest tightening, cracking, until it feels like my rib cage might splinter beneath the weight of everything I can’t say.
The screen glows up at me from the cradle of my palm.
Legs crossed at the knee, red heels dangling like a warning sign, I sit perched on the edge of my glass-and-steel office like a bird waiting to fall.
The morning sun filters through the cubicle walls, refracting light onto my skin like a kaleidoscope of regrets.
I scroll through the dating app again.
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
Laugh. Cringe. Swipe.
Josh08’s profile makes me snort aloud.
“I wish all women came with a warning.”
Ironic. I am the warning. I come with barbed wire and wilted love letters.
Casting my eyes across the office floor, I notice it for the first time, not just people, but patterns.
Eyes glued to phones, fingers swiping like they’re trying to resuscitate their own dead hearts.
Others are hunched over keyboards, pounding out productivity to please people who wouldn’t notice if they vanished tomorrow.
What the hell are we all doing?
We’re ghosts with inboxes.
We’re lonely in high-rises, smiling at screens and forgetting how voices sound in real rooms.
I never saw it like this before, before my chest split open.
Before I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the girl with bloodshot eyes and hollow cheekbones.
Before Blake left.
Now I see it all. I see too much.
This isn’t living.
It’s just... passing time.
And somehow in all this artificial intimacy, I’m supposed to find love again?
Messy buns and ruined mascara.
That’s who I am now.
Love was a world I used to live in.
Now I just visit the ruins on weekends.
Before there were swipes and apps, there were letters. Pens. Words that smelled like ink and effort.
My grandmother wrote with fire in her blood. A bestselling author with a spine made of stardust and spine-tingling chapters.
My grandfather chased truth with a typewriter and a flask.
My mother argues in courtrooms, my father tells stories in lectures.
And me?
I was named Penn because I was supposed to be the next one. The prodigy of paper.
The girl who made them all believe again in words that meant something.
Now I’m writing about catfishing for a digital lifestyle magazine while fending off sleazy DM proposals from men who think grief makes me vulnerable enough to fuck.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
‘The Modern Mask: The Rise of Emotional Catfishing in Digital Romance.’
That was the headline for this month’s feature.
An exposé on how lonely people build palaces out of pixels, seduce with fake smiles, then vanish like smoke.
And yet here I am, sifting through digital lies, just like the ones I write about.
Staring down the barrel of heartbreak and hoping a stranger on a screen might temporarily glue my pieces together.
“Memories are so beautiful, aren’t they?
Until they haunt you.”
The voice cuts through me. Crisp. Measured. Disarming.
My legs drop to the floor like I’ve been caught in something I shouldn’t be doing.
I press my hand against my blood red silk of my shirt my heart thundering.
“Hey what now?” I ask, startled.
He stands in the threshold of my glass cube. I forgot how his voice alone shakes my soul.
“Memories,” he repeats, stepping inside my small space that possibly smells like cold peach tea and heartache. “You’ve got the haunted look of them in your eyes.”
I place my phone face-down on the desk.
“This is for you,” he says, holding out a sealed file. “Sorry to interrupt. But you looked like you needed saving from whatever hell you were sinking into.”
His words land with a thud.
“And Penn this is a delivery I don’t want to deliver.”
The file feels heavy before I even touch it.
My skin starts to sweat.
No.
He wouldn’t.
Blake wouldn’t file for divorce through mailroom delivery.
Would he?
I can feel my pulse hammering, a drumbeat of panic across my ribs.
Penn, breathe.
Don’t pass out in front of Dane.
His eyes flick to my phone, then back to my face.
“Dangerous things, those,” he says, nodding toward the screen. “Phones. And memories. Same poison, different casing.”
He’s not cocky this time. Just knowing. Like a man who’s swallowed his own ghosts.
“I’ve delivered files like that before,” he says quietly. “Always ends the same. A woman crying in her heels, clutching her heart like it still belongs to someone who forgot how to keep time with it.”
“It’s probably just a work file,” I murmur, voice breaking like glass underfoot.
He doesn’t argue. Just nods once, slow.
“For your sake Penn,” he says, voice low, “I hope you’re right.”
He lingers a moment longer than necessary, eyes steady, not hungry just human.
“Like I said before, Penn text me. If you need silence that listens back.”
He turns to go, and as he brushes past, his thumb ghosts the side of my hand.
Gentle.
Unthinking.
A flicker of something neither of us understands yet.
Then he’s gone.
“WHO was that?” Carrie gasps, eyes wide, voice pitched somewhere between scandal and curiosity. “And why did he wink at me like he already knew you in the biblical sense?”
I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand, brushing away the heat desire tangled with shame, confusion, ache.
“He’s the mail guy,” I say flatly. “I crashed into him the day after Blake left. You remember. I was late.”
Carrie’s expression softens, the teasing slipping from her face.
“Oh…honey.”
Her hand rests lightly on my shoulder, warm, grounding. A pause. A breath. The kind of silent understanding only she knows how to offer.
Then her phone rings, shattering the quiet. She groans, answering with that clipped authority she saves for chaos.
“Fuck. I gotta go fan a fire or rip someone’s head off. I’ll be back, give me five, okay? Or fuck, maybe ten.”
She holds up her fingers as she backs toward the door, smirking through the chaos. “This isn’t me bailing on you. This is me being a boss.”
A small, reluctant smile tugs at my lips. “I know. It’s fine.”
I wave her off, pretending I’m okay. Pretending I’m not falling apart.
The door clicks shut.
My phone dings.
New match.
Less than two kilometres away.
Right here inside this slick, glass cage of downtown Wellington.
I turn the screen face down on the desk.
I don’t want to know who it is.
I don’t want to hope it’s him.
But hope doesn’t listen.
Because deep down, I know it’s Blake.
Exactly two kilometres away.
That’s why we chose the bar where it is close enough to share morning tea, to meet for lunch, to walk home hand in hand. Close enough for stolen moments in that tiny office behind the bar, the one cluttered with beer crates and invoices and the ghost of our laughter.
My chest tightens.
Oh god, my heart.
My hands tremble as I hold the envelope his handwriting like a wound reopening.
I know, before I even break the seal, that he’s about to destroy what’s left of me.
I press the remote on my desk, and the glass walls tint, sealing me inside.
The city fades to shadow. The world goes dim.
And that’s when the tears come.
Not pretty ones.
Not cinematic or soft.
The ugly kind raw and shaking, ripped from somewhere deep.
The kind that leave salt trails down your neck and make you wish someone could hold you through the breaking.
DANE
Carrie bursts past me as I slip behind the wall heels biting into tile, hair wild, phone already pressed to her ear like a weapon. She’s fire and chaos and care all at once.
And me?
I’m just the ghost in the hall again.
I shouldn’t have stayed.
I should’ve done what I always do dropped the envelope, said something casual, pretended I was just another shadow passing through her orbit.
But I didn’t.
I lingered.
Long enough to see her fingers tremble when she picked it up.
Long enough to see her eyes flicker to the corner of the page like she already knew whose poison waited inside before the seal even broke.
Blake.
Of course, it was him.
It’s always him.
There’s this thing that happens when grief hits you, don’t move.
You just… still.
Like your body has to turn to stone before your heart can bear the breaking.
That’s what she did.
She froze, breathing shallow, lips parting just slightly, whispering something I couldn’t hear but somehow felt.
Like her soul was trying to call back the parts he took when he left.
I could’ve walked in.
Could’ve said something soft. You don’t have to hold it together. You never did.
But I didn’t.
Because I knew this wasn’t a moment to fix.
It was a moment to survive.
And Carrie, she’d catch her if she fell.
She always does.
Quietly, but in the light.
Me, I’ve always stayed in the shadows.
So, I stood there, behind the glass wall, as she pressed that small remote and turned her world dim.
The glass darkened to smoke, but I could still feel her pain vibrating through the air, humming through my bones.
The injustice of it.
Of a man who could wreck something so beautiful and still sleep at night.
Blake always had a talent for that, leaving ruin and calling it love. He’d grin when people warned her. “They’re just jealous,” he’d say.
No, Blake. Not jealousy.
Clarity.
I remember being seventeen watching him kiss her behind the gym, her back pressed to the wall, the world spinning around them.
She was light then.
Wild and full of faith.
The kind of girl who believed love could heal anything if she just gave enough of herself.
And he used that belief like a leash.
Wrapped it around her neck and called it devotion.
Even now, he still does
through paper, through memory, through the way her breath stutters when his name appears on a glowing screen.
It kills me.
Not because I want to take his place
but because I want her to forget the version of herself that learned to flinch.
To unlearn the language of pain he taught her.
When she folds the letter, I see it, the breaking.
Not loud. Not dramatic.
Just a quiet, devastating collapse.
Her shoulders curl in.
Her hand covers her mouth.
And through that tinted glass, I swear I can feel her heartbreak echo.
Like something holy just shattered.
And maybe, just maybe, it needed to.
She’s been half-alive since he left.
Breathing but not really living.
Caging herself in routine, calling it strength.
But this pain it’s real.
It’s the kind that carves space for new air.
It’s the kind that saves.
I press my palm to the glass just once.
A silent promise she’ll never hear.
She doesn’t see it.
She doesn’t need to.
But I need her to know that somewhere, someone still sees her.
I walk away before I do something I can’t undo.
The corridor hums with fluorescent light, the air stale with everything unsaid.
By the time I reach the elevator, my reflection stares back hollow eyes, jaw tight.
The mail guy, invisible.
The boy who’s loved her since he was four years old.
I remember her in pigtails, chasing butterflies at the end of my grandmother’s driveway.
The first time she smiled at me, I swear I heard the ocean inside my chest.
She was always the sound of home.
And I’ve spent my whole damn life standing at the edge of it, afraid to knock.
I tell myself it’s enough that she’s free now, that maybe someday she’ll wake and the first thing she feels won’t be the weight of him.
That she’ll stop carrying his ghost in her lungs.
Maybe then when the shaking stops,
when the silence feels like peace instead of punishment she’ll look up and find me there.
Not behind glass .Not pretending.
Just me.
And maybe she’ll finally see what I’ve known since we were kids, she was never unlovable. She was just loved by the wrong man.
Outside, the air is sharp, slicing through me as I step into the dying light. My pulse thrums in my neck, anger, grief, longing, all of it bleeding into one unbearable truth.
I need air. I need distance. But what I really need—is her.