Chapter 2 The Mute Button
The coffee is still hot when the notification comes in.
I'm sitting by the window with my mug and my phone, watching the lake do nothing, the way I do most mornings here.
The signal in this town is poor enough that notifications arrive in clusters. A small red pile-up, then silence for an hour. I've come to like that rhythm.
The red dot on my messages is from Isabella.
I open it. One photo: a small table arranged with supplements. Dried herbs in a glass jar, dried berries in a ceramic bowl, a row of brown bottles with the labels turned outward. Someone put effort into the arrangement. It's almost pretty.
In the corner of the frame, half-tucked behind one of the bottles, is a box of prenatal vitamins.
The caption reads: Our doctor says everything is perfect. So ready for our next chapter.
I read it twice. Top to bottom, then top to bottom again.
Not a single word out of place. Every syllable grateful, warm, appropriate. If I showed this to anyone, they'd see a woman sharing good news.
She knows how to cut without leaving a mark. She always has.
The first year was the bad one.
I couldn't see it clearly then. What I could see was my phone screen at two in the morning.
Zooming in on corners of photos. The edge of a hand she didn't fully crop. A reflection in a window behind them that might have been a bedroom or might have been a hallway. I stared at it long enough that it stopped looking like either.
I knew what I was doing was making it worse. I kept doing it anyway.
One night in that first year, I don't know which month, I took a sleeping pill before bed, and when it didn't work, took another one somewhere around two in the morning. I still watched the ceiling go from black to grey.
That was when I admitted it to myself: something was wrong with me.
I took antidepressants for eight months. I'm not ashamed of that. I just mention it because that's what the timeline actually looked like.
Eight months of a small white pill every morning and a therapist I saw over video call from a country where no one knew my name.
They kept me alive. They didn't bring me back.
The thing that finally moved was a memory, not a revelation.
I was nineteen, and I'd failed an exam badly enough that I sat down on a bench outside the building and couldn't make myself get up.
Callum found me. He sat down next to me without asking what happened, and after a while he bought us both bad coffee from the machine inside, and we sat there until I was ready to stand.
That's all. Nothing dramatic. He just stayed.
I thought about that moment and then I thought, he is the one who pushed you off the bench this time.
There is no second Callum coming. No one is going to sit down next to me in this particular dark and wait until I'm ready to stand. If I want to get up, I'm the one who has to do it.
So I did the administrative version of getting up.
I closed the app. I booked a one-way ticket.
I found this lake town on a map because it was far from the airport and the reviews mentioned unreliable cell service, and I moved into an apartment where the Wi-Fi drops twice a day and no one has ever heard of Silverpine.
Two weeks after I arrived, I found the mute button on her profile. My thumb sat on it for a few seconds.
Then I pressed it.
I left it on for another eight months.
***
The thing is, I'm fine now. I don't mean the word the way people use it to end conversations. I mean, I opened her profile this morning and my coffee didn't get cold. That's a real metric.
I read the prenatal vitamins caption again. Then I tap the like button.
When she has a baby, she'll be busy. Too busy to post, probably. Too busy to think about who's watching.
That's a reasonable prediction.
I close the message.
Three posts down, a public one, posted to everyone, sixty-three comments already. Callum in a kitchen, wearing an apron, caught in profile. He's stirring something. The angle catches the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders.
The caption is Isabella's: He said he wants to make his Luna a new recipe. Can't wait.
Under it: my father's account, a brief and contented blessing. A string of university friends — this is too sweet, Cal cooks?? recipe please. The usual warmth.
And then, near the bottom, a name I recognize. Someone from our university cohort. "Wait, wasn't Callum supposed to be with someone else?? What happened at that ceremony lol"
She doesn't know. She was abroad. She missed the part where everyone pretended it had always been this way.
I remember being the kind of couple people cited as evidence that things work out. That was a real thing that happened, in rooms I can still picture.
I look at the photo again. The profile of him in the kitchen, apron strings tied loosely in the back. He looks exactly the same.
Two years. The only things that changed are the person standing next to him, and what I feel looking at his face.
I set my phone face-down on the table.
The lake is flat and grey outside the window. The coffee is still warm. Somewhere across the water, a bird calls once and then stops.
My phone buzzes — the notification cluster from the last hour, arriving all at once.
I don't turn it over.