Calls could be intercepted. Messages could be altered. The moment I went to her, I became a stalker. But there was one place, I believed, that no one could touch.
Her, B, and me. A chat room on the messaging app with the three of us in it: a group chat. Whatever was posted there, all three of us read the same. If someone deleted something, a trace of the deletion remained. If someone changed something, the other two would know. There, I thought, no one could tamper with the truth.
From that night on I began posting stories in that room. One a day. I didn’t ask whether she wanted them.
It was the story of X, thirty-eight, quarreling with V, thirty-two, over the price of concert tickets. X, who called his habit of weighing every price diversification, grumbles that the tickets are too expensive, then goes into his own brain and meets animals made of light. A story about emotion being a 90-second guest. A story about how to get up from the yellow chair. There were nights I turned my rule on V too. I wrote that V ending up in the yellow chair might be the karma of her past choices.
Fiction, as a form, protected me. No one was named, no one accused. And yet, I believed, everyone who read it would know. The story was a letter to her, and a mirror held up to B, and beyond B, to H.
B never once replied. But he never left the room either. Every night, the number that counts the people who haven’t read a message dropped from 2 to 1, then soon disappeared. Both accounts had read it. Who was behind those accounts, there was no way to know.
Truth doesn’t have to be dragged out. Just leave it where the light falls, and the side that is hiding loses its hiding place first. I didn’t shout. Every night, one story at a time, I only let in a little more light. At least, that was what I believed then.
I thought I wasn’t taking revenge. I believed I held their weak points, the leverage that moves people. I believed my logs told me what they were trying to hide. That I only had to hold it, never swing it. That I only had to steer this game to checkmate, the mate with no escape. Without taking a single piece, without killing anyone.