Weeks passed.
Or maybe it was only days. Isaac couldn't tell anymore.
He barely moved from his room.
The apartment, once filled with Aria's humming and his dry comments, felt like an abandoned shell.
The kitchen was too clean now, the sofa too empty, the TV screen gathering a thin layer of dust.
He spent most of his time in bed, lying on his side, staring at the wall.
Sometimes he scrolled aimlessly through his phone, not really seeing any of the words or images; sometimes he just held it loosely in his hand, screen dark, as if he wasn't sure whether he wanted it to light up or not.
Every notification made him flinch.
Vrrr…
The faint buzz of his phone on the nightstand tightened his shoulders every single time.
He started telling himself that it was easier not to look.
That as long as he didn't check, nothing new would be waiting, no more rumours, no more photos, no more messages from people who thought they understood what had happened.
He had quit modelling.
The agency had sent a couple of emails at first, checking on his schedule, asking if he was open to new jobs.
When he didn't respond, they sent a more direct message asking if everything was alright, reminding him of his obligations.
He had stared at the mail for a long time before finally typing two short lines:
[I'm done. Please take me off your roster.]
He hit send, closed the app, and refused to open it again.
He stopped going to lectures.
At first, he told himself it was temporary, just a few days until things calmed down.
But then another day passed, then another, and the idea of walking through campus again, of feeling people's eyes on him, became unbearable.
Assignments piled up in his inbox, reminders from the university system blinking red.
Group projects asked if he could contribute his part.
A few classmates messaged him directly:
- [Hey, man, are you okay? Haven't seen you around.]
- [Did something happen with Aria? I heard stuff but it sounds crazy.]
- [If you need to talk, I'm here.]
He read a few of them, then closed the chat without answering.
He barely ate.
Sometimes, hours would go by before he realised he hadn't had anything except a glass of water all day.
His stomach would twist, but the idea of cooking felt like work meant for a different person, a different life.
Every day became a minefield of imagined consequences.
Every decision, no matter how small, came with a new "what if."
'Should I leave the apartment today?' he would think as he stood by the door, hand hovering near the handle.
'No… what if she comes over and thinks I've abandoned her?'
He didn't know if Aria would ever come back here.
He didn't know if she even wanted to.
But the possibility that she might, that one day she could knock on the door and find the apartment empty, froze him in place.
So he stayed.
Inside.
On the same bed.
In the same clothes for longer than he wanted to admit.
His phone would buzz again.
'Should I read this text?'
'No… what if it's another accusation? Another video? Another message that proves I ruined everything even more than I already did?'
The thought of seeing her name show up on the screen made his heart stop; the thought of not seeing her name show up hurt in a different way.
'Should I contact her parents?'
The idea came to him sometimes late at night, in the quiet moments when guilt was loudest.
He would stare at the ceiling and think:
'I should call. I should ask about her. I should apologise properly.'
Then the fear would wrap around the thought like a rope.
'No… what if I make her feel worse?'
What if they told her he had called?
What if her father used that against her?
What if she had finally managed to breathe without thinking of him, and he dragged her backwards?
Paralysed by guilt, he spiralled further.
His world shrank to the dimensions of his room and the small pathway from his bed to the bathroom.
Vrrr…
His phone buzzed again on the nightstand.
This time, the number on the screen was unfamiliar, but he didn't need a name to know who it was.
He didn't even open the message.
He unlocked his phone, went straight to the call log, blocked the number without reading anything, and then dropped the device face-down on the bed.
Knock knock knock!
The sound echoed faintly from the front door.
He didn't even bother getting up.
It had been this way for a while now.
Ever since the stalker had confirmed that Aria was no longer around, she had escalated.
Messages.
Calls.
Unknown numbers.
Different accounts trying to reach him on every platform.
And when those didn't work, she came in person.
Sometimes she knocked.
Sometimes she rang the bell over and over.
Sometimes she just stood out there, waiting.
He had looked through the peephole once and seen her standing in the hallway, eyes fixed on the door, shoulders tense with anticipation.
After that, he stopped looking.
He sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his face with both hands, fingers digging into his eyes until sparks of colour flashed behind his eyelids.
'Why is this happening?'
The question circled in his head again, not because he expected an answer, but because his brain refused to let it go.
Only a couple of months ago, everything had been simple.
He and Aria had gone to class, complained about assignments, fought over who finished the snacks, and watched stupid shows on the sofa.
They hadn't had many friends.
They hadn't needed many.
Their world had been small, but it had been stable.
Happy, even.
Now, everything was ruined.
Aria's entire life had been destroyed, her reputation, her sense of safety, her trust in others.
She had been dragged back to her parents' house, forced into an environment where no one believed her.
And Isaac had been left alone in the place that used to be theirs.
Left with the knowledge that every step in that chain led back, somehow, to him.
'It's all my fault.'
The words repeated themselves so often in his mind that they no longer felt like thoughts; they felt like facts.
'If I hadn't modelled in the first place… she wouldn't have seen me in that magazine.'
'If I'd taken that first confession seriously, I could've stopped her.'
'If I'd pushed harder when the rumours started, if I'd forced the professors to listen, if I'd told her parents everything sooner…'
Every "if" added another stone to the pile already crushing his chest.
He stood up slowly, his body feeling heavier than it should, and made his way out of his room.
The apartment seemed almost unfamiliar in its quiet.
No half-finished mugs of coffee left on the counter.
No shoes kicked off in the middle of the hallway.
No sound of Aria singing off-key along to whatever was on the computer.
Just stillness.
He walked to the front door.
The knocking had stopped.
He didn't look through the peephole.
He didn't check if anyone had left something there.
He simply turned around and went back down the hallway.
Back to his room.
Back to the bed.
'I'm tired…'
The thought wasn't dramatic.
It wasn't even sharp.
Just flat.
Dull.
Heavy.
He collapsed onto the mattress, the springs creaking faintly under his weight, and rolled onto his side.
His eyes slipped shut.
He didn't know if he wanted to sleep or just stop thinking for a while.
The ceiling, the walls, the empty half of the bed next to him, all of it blurred together as darkness edged in at the sides of his vision.
For a little while, Isaac let himself drift.
Not into rest, exactly.
Just away.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
And then, late one night…
Vrrrrrr… Vrrrrr…
A notification.
Isaac's eyes snapped open.
For a second, he didn't know where he was.
The room was dark except for the faint glow from the window; the streetlight outside cast long, pale bars across the floor.
His neck ached from having fallen asleep at a strange angle, one arm pinned under his head.
The vibration continued.
Vrrrrrr…
He turned his head.
His phone lay on the nightstand, screen lighting up the clutter beside it: an empty glass, a half-folded shirt, an old receipt he had never thrown away.
His first instinct was to ignore it.
He had been doing that for days.
Let it buzz, let it go dark, pretend there was nothing there.
As long as he didn't look, nothing new could hurt him.
But something in his chest twisted.
A bad feeling.
A heavy, crawling dread that wouldn't let him turn away.
He reached for the phone with stiff fingers, palms clammy, and unlocked it.
As the message thread opened, his hands started shaking.
The contact name at the top of the screen made his blood run cold.
[Aria]
For a moment, he just stared without reading any further, his brain refusing to process the lines below.
Then his gaze dropped.
Messages lined up one after another, each one stamped with the same time.
His breath caught.
- [Aria: It's all your fault.] [21:01]
- [Aria: I trusted you.] [21:01]
- [Aria: You ruined my life.] [21:02]
- [Aria: The other night I heard my parents talking. They were talking about what to do with me.] [21:02]
- [Aria: They still don't believe me.] [21:04]
- [Aria: Nobody believes me.] [21:06]
The room tilted.
He swallowed hard, throat dry, his vision blurring around the edges as if the words refused to stay still.
Each message felt like a physical blow.
His chest tightened until breathing became a conscious effort.
The hand holding the phone shook so violently that the device almost slipped from his grip.
He hadn't heard from her since she left.
He had imagined a hundred different versions of what she might say if she ever messaged him again.
None of them looked like this.
He forced himself to keep reading, fingers tightening around the phone as if dropping it would make the messages vanish, and with them, any chance of understanding.
There was a twenty-minute gap after the last line.
The next batch came in a new wave, the timestamps marching down the screen.
- [Aria: I enjoyed living with you, you were my best friend.] [21:29]
- [Aria: I even gave you my body, that was how much I trusted you.] [21:30]
- [Aria: You betrayed that trust.] [21:30]
His heart lurched painfully.
She had never said those things out loud before.
Not like that.
He remembered the nights when they had laughed too hard and drunk too much, the way one thing had led to another.
It had never been romantic.
It had just… happened.
Something they both accepted without labelling.
To her, it had been more than that.
Not in some dramatic, romantic way, just in the sense that it represented trust.
The one place where she could let herself relax completely.
And now, with a few words, she had framed it as a betrayal.
His breath hitched.
Another gap.
- [Aria: It hurts.] [21:47]
- [Aria: I can't deal with this anymore.] [21:47]
- [Aria: I'm sorry.] [21:48]
That was the final message.
His world narrowed to that last line.
He read it once, twice, three times.
Then he scrolled back to the beginning, reading all of them again as if the order might change, as if some new meaning might magically appear.
But the text didn't shift.
The times didn't move.
The meaning didn't soften.
— It's all your fault.
— You ruined my life.
— I can't deal with this anymore.
— I'm sorry.
His heart stopped and then started pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat.
His chest hurt.
It actually hurt, a tight, crushing pressure that made it feel like the air in the room had been sucked out completely.
His hands trembled around the phone.
The screen wobbled in his vision.
'No…'
His mind refused to accept it.
Aria wasn't the type of person to give up.
She wasn't the type to run away, to disappear quietly, to let other people decide her story for her.
She was loud.
Annoying.
Persistent.
She made things happen.
She forced her way through life with a smile and sheer stubbornness.
She wasn't supposed to send messages like this.
She wasn't supposed to sound like someone at the end of a road.
And yet…
He couldn't shake off the unspeakable dread that crawled through him, slow and suffocating, tightening around his lungs.
Every misstep.
Every hesitation.
Every time he had thought, "It's okay, I'll deal with it later."
All of it had led to this moment.
All of it had cornered the one person who had saved him, the one person who had trusted him enough to share everything with him, until the only messages she could send him now were accusations, confessions, and apologies.
Vrrr… vrrrr…
His phone continued buzzing, a new incoming call flashing across the top of the screen.
He saw the number.
He knew, instinctively, who it was.
He ignored it.
The call buzzed again, the sound drilling into his skull, but he forced his thumb to drag the notification away, shutting the ringing out of existence.
He couldn't handle another voice.
Not now.
Not on top of this.
'This can't be real.'
He read the chat log again from the top, desperately searching for some hint that this was something else.
A prank.
A mistake.
A conversation he had somehow forgotten.
But the timestamps were clear.
The tone was clear.
The pain in each line was too sharp to be anything but real.
At the end of the day, there was only one conclusion he could reach from the messages on his screen.
He had survived.
She hadn't.
Not in the way that mattered.
He believed her words with a crushing certainty.
'It's all my fault.'
His mind latched onto that sentence like it was the only thing holding him together.
'If only I had said something different to that girl.'
He saw again the stalker's blood-covered smile, her delighted laugh when she admitted to everything.
He had hit her.
He had walked away.
He had not dragged her in front of someone who could do something.
He had not recorded her confession.
He had not made her face consequences beyond his fist.
'If only I had quit modelling sooner.'
If his face hadn't been in that magazine, she never would have seen him.
She never would have fixated on him.
She never would have gone after Aria.
'If only I had said something more when Aria had been accused.'
He had defended her to the professor, but only once.
He had tried to speak during the call with her father, but he had been shut down.
He hadn't called back.
He hadn't forced another conversation.
'If only I had tried reaching out more.'
He had sat outside her door for days.
He had cooked.
He had talked through the wood.
But somewhere along the line, he had convinced himself that being nearby was enough, that giving her space was what she needed.
Maybe it hadn't been.
Maybe everything he had chosen, every time he had stayed quiet, every time he had retreated instead of pushing forward, had been the wrong decision.
The survivor's guilt didn't rush in all at once.
It seeped into him, slowly, like something thick and dark filling his lungs.
It wrapped around his ribs.
It settled into his bones.
It turned every memory he had of Aria into another reason to hate himself.
He stared at the messages until the words blurred.
Then, with fingers that felt disconnected from his body, he opened the chat box and typed.
- [Isaac: I'm sorry.] [01:29]
The two words sat there, small and useless under the weight of everything above them.
He stared at the typing indicator.
Nothing appeared.
No reply.
No read receipt.
No new message sliding onto the screen to tell him that she had seen it, that she had decided to scream at him, or curse him, or say anything at all.
Minutes passed.
Then hours.
The phone remained silent.
Isaac's shoulders slumped.
His grip on the device loosened.
His hands, still shaking, finally let go.
The phone slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor, bouncing once before landing face-up.
The light from the screen cast a faint glow across the room, illuminating the corner of the bed and the scattered clothes nearby.
The messages remained there, waiting.
Final.
Undeniable.
He couldn't erase them.
Even if he deleted the entire chat, even if he changed phones, even if he tried to block out the memory, the words were carved into him now.
They weren't going anywhere.
He curled in on himself on the bed, pulling his knees up to his chest, arms wrapping around them like he was trying to make his body smaller.
His forehead rested against his knees.
He rocked slightly, unconsciously.
The apartment felt colder than it ever had before, the air thin and stale.
Shadows stretched across the walls, twisted by the faint light from the fallen phone.
They made the room look unfamiliar, warped, as if something in the space itself had changed when she left.
Every corner seemed to whisper blame.
Every object reminded him of her.
The pink apron hanging in the kitchen.
The mug she always used for coffee.
The blanket on the sofa that still held the faint outline of where she used to curl up.
In his mind, the whispers formed words.
'It's your fault.'
'You ruined everything.'
'You failed her.'
He didn't know how much time passed like that.
Hours.
Maybe a full day.
He didn't eat.
The thought of food made his stomach twist into knots.
He didn't sleep.
He closed his eyes, but sleep never came; only more memories did.
Aria laughing, Aria complaining, Aria yelling at him for waking her up too early.
Aria crying in front of the blackboard.
Aria's voiceless stare before her father carried her away.
He didn't move.
Everything beyond the bed felt distant, like someone else's life existed out there in the rest of the apartment.
Every action now felt like an impossibility.
To answer a call meant risking hearing more bad news, more accusations, more consequences.
To leave the apartment meant entering a world that had already judged him and found him lacking.
To speak to anyone meant facing questions he didn't know how to answer.
Every decision felt like a potential disaster.
Every choice might make someone else hurt.
Might undo the last remnants of sanity he was clinging to.
The stalker's words still lingered.
No matter how much he tried to push them away, they seeped back in.
— I did it all for you…
— You'll finally see me.
They overlapped with Aria's texts until he couldn't separate them anymore.
Aria was gone.
He didn't know exactly what had happened after those messages.
He didn't know what her father's text said, or what the university whispered, or what her parents decided to do with her after that night.
He could only imagine.
And every version he imagined ended badly.
Because that was what the messages had felt like: an ending.
He couldn't stop replaying the chat log in his mind, line by line, tone by tone.
Vrrr.
His phone buzzed again on the floor, skittering slightly against the wood.
He glanced down.
A new notification flashed.
A message from Aria's father.
His thumb twitched.
For a moment, he considered picking it up, unlocking the screen, and reading what it said.
Maybe it was confirmation.
Maybe it was an accusation.
Maybe it was something worse.
His finger hovered in the air, frozen.
Pressed down by terror.
If he read it, he would have to accept whatever was written there.
If he didn't, he could still almost pretend that he didn't know, that the worst-case scenario was only a possibility and not a fact.
He let his hand fall uselessly onto the mattress.
He remembered Aria's voice, weak and trembling, insisting again and again:
— I didn't do it.
No matter how many times people told her she had.
No matter how much the world insisted the photos were proof.
She had clung to that one truth, begging the people she loved to believe her.
And then her final words, stark and simple on the screen:
- [Aria: I can't deal with this anymore.] [21:47]
- [Aria: I'm sorry.] [21:48]
The guilt pressed in from all sides.
It wasn't just sadness.
It wasn't just regret.
It was the specific, suffocating weight of knowing that he was still here.
Breathing.
Existing.
When the person who had dragged him up out of his own darkness had been pushed into one of her own and left there.
Survivor's guilt.
The kind that didn't care if he had meant well.
The kind that didn't listen to explanations.
The kind that treated every memory like evidence.
It ate at him from the inside, stripping away everything that had once felt solid, leaving only raw, jagged edges.
He whispered into the darkness.
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry, Aria."
The words were quiet, barely louder than his own breathing.
No one answered.
The apartment remained silent, the only sound the soft, persistent hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the distant noise of cars passing outside the window.
Isaac lay there, staring at nothing.
And he knew, with sickening clarity, that nothing would ever be the same again.
Not college.
Not this apartment that had once been their safe place.
Not the person he saw in the mirror.
He would move.
He would exist.
He would keep going because time would drag him forward whether he wanted it to or not.
But he would always be walking in the shadow of the girl he had failed.
The girl whose trust had been broken.
————「❤︎」————