She was wearing a gray college sweatshirt.
Daniel’s gray college sweatshirt. The faded one with the cracked lettering and the bleach stain on the left cuff. The one he’d told me he lost on a work trip last fall.
Under the picture were four words:
Can’t wait for Friday.
I stared at it until the seconds ran out and the image simply blinked off my screen, as if it had never existed.
A new text appeared right after.
Sorry, wrong chat.
I read it twice. Then three times.
Beside me, Daniel breathed slowly and evenly.
“Wrong chat,” I whispered to the ceiling.
Brooke always used one of those third-party disappearing-message apps that ran on top of regular texting. They didn’t warn the sender about screenshots. They just trusted you to play fair.
I didn’t play fair.
I reached for the old iPad I kept on my nightstand for recipes. I couldn’t bring the image back, but the app had left the thumbnail sitting in my notification preview for a few more seconds, and I photographed my phone’s screen before it vanished. Then I emailed the picture to myself and saved it into a folder I named Recipes.
After that, I lay back down and let eleven years replay behind my eyes.
The Christmas Brooke laughed at my new haircut in front of Daniel’s mother, back when his mother could still laugh.
The summer she “borrowed” my pearl earrings, the ones my father gave me on my wedding day, and somehow never remembered to return them.
The hundred times Daniel had shrugged and said, “That’s just Brooke. You know how she is.”
I did know how she was.
