He was twenty-nine, worked in fleet logistics, and paid $24.99 a month for the tier that included what the site called personal replies. She used his name. She remembered that his knee was bad. Across fourteen months he sent her roughly seven hundred messages and she answered about one in nine, a ratio he had never counted and could recite.

In April he let the card lapse on purpose, to see. The messages still delivered. They still said Read. He sent four more over two weeks: a joke about her cat, then a question, then a shorter question, then just hey. The last was a long apology for being weird. It said Read at 11:04 p.m., and then nothing, ever.