Chapter 23
I close my laptop but sleep never comes.
The alarm doesn’t go off anymore. I just wake up. Like my body remembers the ache before my mind does.
The ceiling above me is pale and quiet and far too clean for the mess inside my head. I lie there for a while, breathing in the stillness, pretending I don’t have to move. The sheets cling to my skin like they’re trying to keep me here, in this space between sleep and remembering.
But I can’t stay. I never can.
When I finally swing my legs over the edge of the bed, the floor shocks me with its cold. It bites at my toes, and I curl them against it like I can anchor myself there. The air smells faintly of rain, damp wood, and the faint ghost of yesterday’s coffee.
My body moves before my brain catches up habit, not will. Bathroom. Mirror. The woman who stares back at me looks like she’s been living on the edge of something sharp. Eyes bruised by sleepless nights, lips dry, skin pale enough to fade.
I used to know her. Now she’s just… tired.
The water from the shower hits too hot, a sting that feels almost like penance. Steam clouds around me until I can’t see anything but the blur of it. I close my eyes and press my forehead to the tiles.
Blake’s voice is still there. Dane’s hands. Carrie’s voice echoing, asking questions I don’t know how to answer. The magazine piece blinking at me from my laptop screen like a dare.
They live in my head, all of them, tangled like wires.
I breathe in the steam, slow and deep, until my lungs burn. You’re alive, I remind myself. Even if you wish you weren’t some mornings.
By the time I step out, the mirror’s fogged over. Good. I don’t want to see myself anyway.
I pull on the first clothes I find denim, a shirt that still smells faintly like the ocean from last weekend’s drive. I knot my hair up, not because it looks good but because it’s one less thing to think about.
The smell of coffee fills the kitchen, bitter and grounding. I pour it black. The way Blake used to. I hate that I still make it like he liked it. I sip it anyway. It burns my tongue.
The house is too quiet. It hums with everything unsaid.
I need air.
Barefoot, I step outside. The grass is wet, the early morning kind of damp that seeps into your bones. The wind lifts the ends of my hair, cool against my neck. The world feels half-awake, fragile and soft in that brief space before the noise starts.
I walk the path I could follow blindfolded. The one that leads to her.
The flowers are wild now dahlias, daisies, lavender pushing through the soil like they’ve got something to prove. The petals move with the breeze, alive, defiant.
I kneel. The damp earth soaks through my jeans, clings to my palms as I dig my fingers in.
“Morning, baby,” I whisper.
My voice cracks. The sound barely makes it out.
I trace her name on the small plaque half-hidden under the flowers. My thumb follows each letter, memorising it again and again, like the world might take it from me if I stop. The air smells of wet grass and earth, of grief that never really leaves.
My chest aches, slow and deep, the kind of pain that feels stitched into my skin.
I close my eyes and let the wind move around me. I imagine it’s her. That soft rush. That warmth. That whisper of something still here.
The tears come quietly, like they always do. Not sobs, just… leaking. A silent surrender.
When I finally stand, my knees are damp, my coffee’s cold, and the day is waiting like it doesn’t care what it’s taken from me.
Blake.
Dane.
The piece I still have to write. Carrie, watching me unravel and pretending not to.
They all live somewhere inside the blur.
My phone vibrates in the pocket of my skirt. A shiver through the quiet. I don’t even have to look to know it’s one of them.
Still, I do. Because I always do.
Morning, Peach. Don’t drown today.
I stare at the words until they blur. No punctuation. No demand. Just that small mercy of being seen.
I type nothing back. Just press my thumb to the screen like maybe he’ll feel it.
Then my eyes find all the messages from Blake.
He doesn’t know it’s me. He knows me as Pandora.
The woman I built out of fragments part fantasy, part ghost, part everything I used to be before he broke me.
His name glows on the screen like a warning.
“Can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Didn’t sleep last night.” “You do something to me, Pandora.”
I read them over and over, pulse hammering. Every word feels like a blade wrapped in honey.
This isn’t the Blake I married. That man was sharp edges and ego; charm polished for public view. He loved the reflection of himself in my eyes, not me. But this Blake the one pouring his heart out to a stranger online he’s softer. Needier. Almost…human.
He tells her things he never told me.
He says he feels seen.
Wanted.
Understood.
And it kills me.
Because it’s me he’s talking to.
It’s always been me. Only now, he doesn’t know it.
I try to tell myself this is just research, just an experiment for the article but I know that’s a lie. This is punishment. Revenge. Curiosity. All tangled together until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I type slowly, fingers trembling.
You sound tired. Rough night?
He replies almost instantly.
Couldn’t sleep. Kept thinking about you. About us.
Us.
The word punches through me like air too sharp to swallow.
I glance at my call log. My texts.
Three unread messages to Blake, my husband, my ghost the real him.
He hasn’t answered in weeks. But he’s been messaging her for hours.
I want to scream.
I want to ask him why she is worth his words when I’m not. But instead, I stay behind the mask.
‘Maybe you should try closing your eyes for once. Stop running from the dark. It’s softer than you think.’
He sends a voice note this time, low, rough, the sound of a man unravelling.
“You talk like you’ve seen inside my head. Like you already know me.”
I close my eyes.
I do.
Every inch of him.
Every lie.
Every silence.
When it ends, I just stare at the screen my reflection faint in the glass.
There’s no line between Penn and Pandora anymore. Just static. Just ache.
My phone buzzes again. Another message.
“I need you, Pandora. I can’t explain it. It’s like I’ve been asleep for years, and you just woke me up.”
The tears come fast and hot. Because he never said that to me.
Not once.
Not in ten years.
I press my palm against the glow of his name, like it could warm me through the screen. But all it does is burn.
Somewhere deep down, I know I’m breaking myself on purpose. And worse I can’t stop.
And then I leave.
At the Office
Sitting at my desk, high above downtown Wellington, the glass walls spill sunlight I don’t want. Too much light for how dark I feel inside. The city below pulses like a living thing, horns blaring, coffee carts steaming, people weaving through the noise like they belong in it.
All of them pretending.
And me?
I’m just trying not to come undone.
Collecting sins like bottle caps, lining them up in fragile patterns, trying to make them mean something. Trying to matter. Trying to hold still in a world that never did.
I open my laptop. The cursor blinks at me like a heartbeat, waiting for permission to start. So that’s what I do, I move my eyes over the words I wrote the night before, going through them, feeling them and watching as the memories bleed into the draft.
Love me with Lies: The Art of Catfishing
It promises insight, not heartbreak. It hides how close the knife really is to my own skin.
We live in an age where love is a transaction of pixels and half-truths. Where connection comes in curated bursts filtered faces, clever bios, the illusion of being seen. But what happens when the person behind the screen isn’t who they say they are?
I pause. The irony is heavy, almost cruel. Because tonight, I’m not just writing about the lie. I’m building it.
Catfishing the act of luring someone into a relationship through a false identity, has evolved from a fringe deception into a digital epidemic. It’s not always about money or manipulation. Sometimes, it’s about something far more human. Loneliness. Loss. The desperate hunger to be loved again.
I think about Blake. About how easily he smiled for strangers, how his words once made me believe in forever.
And then I think about Dane the way he said breathe like it was a promise. The way his voice steadied the shaking in my chest without even trying.
Sometimes, catfishing isn’t born from cruelty. Sometimes, it’s born from grief. From the unbearable silence after someone stops choosing you. From the need to be seen—even if you have to become someone else to make it happen.
The words pour out faster now, less journalism, more confession.
My chest aches with every paragraph, my heartbeat syncing with the rhythm of the keys.
We pretend it’s research. We call it curiosity.
But what we’re really doing is searching for the version of ourselves we lost when love left the room.
They say catfishing is the cruellest kind of deceit the digital age’s version of playing god with someone’s heart.
We build false faces, spin curated truths, and throw them into the algorithm, hoping someone will love the illusion.
It’s manipulation disguised as connection; validation wrapped in betrayal. It’s wrong. Immoral. Damaging.
At least, that’s what I used to think before I became the catfish.
It started as research for this very piece.
A deep dive into the psychology of online deceit why people do it, how they justify it, and who gets hurt along the way.
But somewhere between setting up a fake profile and choosing a name that wasn’t mine, I stumbled upon something I never expected: my husband.
The man who’d promised me forever, then disappeared like smoke. The man I’d built a life with, mourned, hated, missed. There he was smiling, charming, swiping right.
So, I did too.
What followed wasn’t research. It was resurrection. Or maybe it was revenge. Somewhere in the blurred lines of curiosity and heartbreak, I found myself becoming both the villain and the victim of my own story.
Catfishing isn’t just about lies. It’s about loneliness. It’s about wanting to be wanted so badly that you build an entirely new self to make it happen. It’s about seeing the person who broke you fall for the ghost you created and realizing that maybe they never really knew you at all.
This is what happens when truth and deception fall in love.
The pros, the cons, the drama…all of it waits in the blink of the cursor. And I, Penn, sit here, hands hovering, heart bruised and messy, building Pandora from the fragments of my own grief.
A sharp knock slices through the quiet. Once. Twice. Then the door swings open before I can answer.
Carrie.
She strides in like she’s been carved from precision killer heels clicking against the polished floor, nails painted a dangerous red, hair slicked back into a bun so severe it could cut glass.
Her pencil skirt doesn’t dare wrinkle. Her confidence doesn’t dare falter. She looks like power stitched in silk.
And I? I look like the ghost of it.
“Good morning, sunshine.” Her voice drips with irony as she claps her hands together, the sound snapping through the room. “Tell me, did you sleep, or did you wage war on the keyboard all night again?”
I force a smile. “A little of both.”
Her eyes sweep over my screen, over the headline glowing in bold black letters. I see it that flicker of recognition. She knows.
“Jesus, Penn…” she murmurs, stepping closer. “You really went there.”
I shrug, the gesture too small for what’s unravelling inside me. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? Or close enough.”
Carrie’s gaze softens, just a little. Beneath all that steel, there’s the woman who’s held my hair back while I sobbed on her bathroom floor. The one who’s seen every broken version of me and still showed up anyway.
“It’s good,” she says finally, sliding into the chair across from me. “Raw. Brutal. A little unhinged. You’ve got blood on every sentence.”
“Occupational hazard,” I say, voice dry.
She smirks, crossing one leg over the other. “Don’t you dare try to pass this off as journalism. This is confession dressed in editor’s notes.”
Her words hang there, daring me to deny them. I don’t.
Carrie leans forward, elbows braced on her knees, eyes like sharpened glass.
“So, what’s next, Miss?” she asks. “You’re going to publish it, right?
Because you kinda have a deadline. And are you finally going to look that man in the eye and hand him his balls on your outstretched palm—then slap him sideways with them? ”
Her challenge hits me dead centre. I don’t have an answer. Not yet.
My gaze drifts back to the screen, to the blinking cursor pulsing like a heartbeat—in, out, in, out—waiting for me to make the next move.
Carrie exhales, smooths down her skirt, and rises. “You’re not finished,” she says, softer now. “But you will be.”
She’s halfway to the door before she glances back, that wicked smile tugging at her red-painted mouth.
“Oh, and Penn?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time you bleed all over the page, at least let me bring the bandages.”
The door clicks shut, leaving me alone with sunlight and silence — too bright, too loud, too honest.
The cursor blinks.
And I start typing.