TRANSCRIPT — recovered from device belonging to R. Osei-Mensah, timestamp corrupted
“I know you’re going to call me tonight. I know what you’re going to say. Don’t.”
End of message. Sender: Varun Pillai. Received: [ERROR]. Sent: [ERROR].
—
Rasha found it on a Tuesday, which was the kind of day that had no business holding anything strange. She was eating cereal at her kitchen table in her apartment near the Fell’s Point waterfront in Baltimore, watching the harbor light move across the ceiling the way it did every morning, slow and silver, and her phone was just sitting there beside her bowl. She picked it up to check the weather. Instead she found the message.
She read it three times.
Varun had sent it at 11:47 the previous night. That much the timestamp said, though the word “Received” sat beside a blinking question mark that she had never seen her messaging app produce before. She scrolled up through their conversation. The last real exchange between them had been six days ago, a brief back-and-forth about a documentary they’d both half-watched. Nothing significant. Then a gap of silence, and then this.
She had not called him last night. She had gone to bed early, taken her medication, and slept without dreaming.
She had not been planning to call him.
Had she?
Rasha set the phone face-down and finished her cereal. The harbor light kept moving.
She and Varun had known each other for almost four years, ever since they’d ended up in the same graduate seminar on cognitive linguistics at Johns Hopkins. He was precise where she was instinctive, methodical where she moved by feel. They had argued constantly in class and become close friends because of it. When she’d gone through her difficult winter two years ago — the kind of winter she didn’t discuss in detail with anyone — Varun had been the one who drove her to her appointments without asking questions. She trusted him the way you trust someone who has seen you at your worst and simply stayed.
But the message was wrong. The syntax of it was wrong. Varun didn’t speak that way, clipped and declarative, as though issuing instructions. He was verbose, fond of qualifications and parenthetical asides. And “don’t” at the end of a sentence, alone like that, like a door closing — that wasn’t him.
She picked up the phone and called him.
“Hey,” he said, sounding normal, sounding entirely like himself. Coffee sounds in the background, a spoon against ceramic.
“Did you send me something last night?”
A pause. Not long, but present. “I don’t think so. What do you mean?”
She read him the message.
Another pause, longer. “Rasha, I didn’t write that.”
“It’s in our thread. It’s from your number.”
“Send me a screenshot.”
She did. He called her back in four minutes.
“I genuinely don’t know what that is,” he said. His voice had changed slightly, the casual morning warmth replaced by something more careful. “My phone doesn’t show it on my end. There’s nothing sent after the documentary thing.”
“So it’s a glitch.”
“Must be. Some kind of server error, maybe a message that got mis-routed or duplicated from somewhere else and landed in our thread. It happens.”
It didn’t really happen. Not like that. But she said “right” and they moved on and she spent the rest of the day at her desk in the linguistics department trying to focus on her dissertation chapter and largely failing.
The thing was: she had been thinking about calling him last night.
Not a plan, nothing so concrete as a plan. More of a restlessness, the kind that visited her sometimes after dark, a low pull toward conversation, toward the sound of a familiar voice. She had lain in bed and thought about reaching for her phone and then thought, no, it’s late, and taken her medication and closed her eyes. But the thought had been there. A shape of intention, formless and brief, never acted on.
She hadn’t told Varun that.
Over the following days she kept returning to the screenshot. She studied the timestamp. She Googled the error code that replaced the “Received” field and found nothing, not a single forum post, not a single tech support thread. She emailed the app’s support team and received an automated reply that promised a response within five to seven business days.
She did not hear from them.
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