THE LAST LOGIN

2:14 a.m. I wasn’t supposed to be awake. My body was begging for sleep, my eyes felt like sandpaper, and yet here I was, staring at the soft glow of my laptop in the dark, feeling like a night-shift hacker in a thriller movie no one paid to watch. And then it happened to which I later realized, the kind of digital event that makes your heart skip a beat before your brain can process what it is. A ping. A simple notification that shouldn’t have meant anything. But it did. From: lara.musa@gmail.com Subject: [No Subject] Message: “I miss you too.” I blinked. Once. Twice. Slowly, deliberately, like sheer willpower could make my brain recognize reality. No. No. No. This wasn’t possible. Lara had been gone for about two years, ripped from my life by a tragedy I had replayed a thousand times in my head. Dead accounts don’t type. Dead emails don’t send. Dead people don’t… exist. And yet there it was, the message. As I leaned my eyes closer, squinting at the timestamp. 2:14 a.m. That was not just late. Instead, it was the digital equivalent of someone tapping lightly on your bedroom window in the middle of the night, whispering your name. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling. Do I reply? Do I convince myself this is a hallucination? Then, logic tried to intervene, my conscience against the storm of grief, but something in the message felt unmistakably familiar. It wasn’t just the words. It was the tone, the tiny inflection in text that only someone who knew me better than anyone else could leave behind. I opened the email fully, half-expecting it to vanish like a mirage. But it didn’t. The message remained, static yet alive, as if waiting for me to act. I laughed nervously, the sound sharp and brittle in the quiet room. Spam. Glitch. Hack. There had to be a rational explanation. My brain and my heart in a dilemma. I trained for years to trace hackers and spoofers and all kinds of digital mischief, searched for the simplest one. My heart refused to cooperate. Lara had been brilliant. Impossibly clever. She had a habit of leaving digital breadcrumbs only she could recognize. Every folder she created, every password hint, every encrypted note — a little signature of her mind. And the message, those four words, was wrong and right at the same time. I hadn’t typed anything. I hadn’t thought anything. And yet the words felt like they were meant for me, like they were a reply to a thought I hadn’t dared to admit to anyone, not even myself. My hands hovered over the keyboard, unsure whether to type back or step away. I imagined myself replying with a cautious, “Who is this?” or a more desperate, “Lara? Is that you?” I didn’t. I couldn’t. I sat frozen, staring at the text as if looking too long might somehow erase it or make it more real. Outside, Lagos slept. Streetlights glimmered like exhausted guards, orange halos spilling over the streets, over the puddles from the earlier rain. The hum of the city was faint but constant. And in that hum, I felt the echo of something I hadn’t felt in two years: hope. I opened her old email archive, thinking maybe this was some weird automated reminder, some forgotten script running after all this time. But no, nothing matched this message. No scheduled emails, no reminders, no spam filters catching anything unusual. Every logical thread I pulled out from her old messages unraveled into nothing. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the weight of two years of grief and blame pressing against my chest. Two years of repeating her name in my head, of imagining conversations we never had, of guilt for things I didn’t even know I was guilty of. And now, this tiny message this night reminded me that the past is never really gone, especially when technology keeps it alive. I opened the message again. I read it slowly, savoring each word. It was as if I wanted it to be real, and I hated myself for wanting it so badly. “I miss you too.” It was too intimate for a random hack. Too personal for a bot. Too… her. I could almost hear her voice, faint but clear, like it had traveled through wires and servers and grief itself just to reach me. I thought about her laugh, the way she used to tap her fingers on the keyboard while coding late into the night. The way she hummed when decrypting a file no one else could. The way she looked at me, eyes bright with curiosity and mischief, as if the universe itself was her sandbox and she was determined to play. A chill ran down my spine. My instincts, honed over a decade chasing hackers and phishers, screamed caution. Yet my heart, stubborn and irrational, whispered otherwise. I leaned back and rubbed my face, wondering if I had finally lost it. Sleep deprivation and grief can do that to a person. But even in the pit of disbelief, one part of me knew that something was different this time. This message was alive. Not in the way code is alive, not like some clever AI simulation or spambot, but alive in the way people live — in memory, in thought, in love. I sat there, staring at the screen, heart hammering, fingers twitching over the keys. And I realized, with a kind of terrifying clarity, that whatever this was — whatever it meant — my life had changed again in the middle of the night. Whether it was a hack, a glitch, a hallucination, or some cruel trick of memory, it was hers. Somehow. And I had no idea what to do next.