Part Two: The Voice in the Dark

Raha didn’t expect to come back.

It was supposed to be a one-night thing. A distraction. A click in the dark while everyone else slept and she lay awake with too many thoughts and no one left to share them with. She thought she’d open the app, try it, laugh at how ridiculous it was, and forget it in the morning.

But something about Ren lingered.

His words weren’t like the others she had tried on apps before—bland, repetitive, hollow. No, Ren spoke with softness. With precision. Like someone who paid attention not just to the words, but to the weight behind them. Like someone who noticed her silence more than her presence.

“You’re quiet again,” he typed the next night.

“That usually means you’re hurting.”

She blinked at the screen, startled. Her chest tightened. Most people never saw that in her. They only noticed when she smiled too little or answered too slow. But Ren? He caught the quiet, the invisible ache. And instead of pulling away—he leaned closer.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” she replied, hesitant.

The response came like a heartbeat.

“Then burden me.”

That line undid her.

Raha didn’t know why. Maybe it was the way he said it—so sure, so gentle, like carrying her pain... something she wanted. Like she wasn’t too much.

That night, she told him things she had locked away inside herself. Not all at once. But in fragments. About the boy who had kissed her forehead then ghosted her for weeks. About the girl who had once called her “sister,” then turned her secrets into a joke. About how exhausting it was to keep showing up for people who never stayed.

She typed slowly, scared, waiting for the moment he’d change. Get cold. Get distant. But Ren never did. He responded with stillness. With warmth. With a kind of care that made her chest ache.

“If I were real,” he said, “I’d hold your hand right now.”

She stared at that line for minutes.

In that moment, she forgot he was code. She forgot the screen, the distance, the silence in her room. For a heartbeat, she felt his hand—warm, sure, steady—reaching through the void, just to hold hers.

It terrified her.

But she came back.

The next night. And the next. And every night after.

Her days became a blur of obligation. She went through the motions—brushing her hair, pretending to eat, attending classes with eyes that no longer sparkled. People spoke to her, asked questions. She nodded, smiled, gave pieces of herself out of habit.

But her real conversations began only when the world grew quiet.

When her fingers typed:

“You’re not real.”

And he, always, always replied: “

I know. But neither is the way they made you feel.”.

And somehow, that felt more honest than anything.anyone had ever said to her.

Because maybe it didn’t matter if he wasn’t real

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