The notifications are her heartbeat. A like here, a comment there, a DM that makes her thumb pause mid-air. She has curated herself into a constellation of pixels: a girl who laughs at the right memes, who posts sunsets she watched alone, who types "haha same" when she feels nothing. The world outside her room has shrunk to a rectangle. But inside that rectangle, people see her. They see her.
There were still nights she retreated into dark rooms. There were days when she did not answer the phone, when old habits are stubborn and the comfort of solitude is a language she had perfected. He learned to wait without pressuring. Sometimes he left a note under her door: a fragment of a song lyric, a doodle of a spaceship, three words that never failed to steady her. The notes mattered less for their content than for the message they carried: I am here. I remember you.
The room was still dark. The walls were still close. But now there was a second heartbeat in the space, faint and digital and impossibly real. Not because Caleb had saved her. Because he had simply said, without saying it: I see you. You exist. You matter enough to be known.