Wrong Inbox, Right Heart

Chapter Three

Holly's POV

I hadn't meant to text him back the second time.

That was the thing I kept telling myself as I moved through Wednesday in the particular bleary fog that comes from four hours of sleep and a full lunch service. I hadn't meant to answer his good morning. I hadn't meant to tell him about Liam. I definitely hadn't meant to keep the conversation going in the small stolen minutes between tables, a quick reply while I refilled the coffee station, another while I waited for an order to come up.

It was nothing. We were strangers. I was a twenty eight year old single mother who smelled like fryer grease by noon and owned exactly one nice dress for interviews. He was. I didn't even know what he was. His name was Marcel and he was awake at midnight and he worked too much. That was the whole picture.

And yet I found myself, during the slow mid afternoon stretch when the diner emptied out and old Gerald in the corner booth nursed his third coffee and Sandra rolled silverware beside me, reading back through our conversation and noticing how easy it was. How he didn't over explain himself or try to be impressive. How he asked short questions and actually waited for the answers.

"You're smiling at your phone," Sandra said, without looking up from her silverware.

"No I'm not."

"Holly. I've worked with you for two years. I've seen you smile maybe eleven times total. You're smiling at your phone."

I put it face down on the counter. "I'm not."

She looked up then, one eyebrow raised, and I felt heat move up the back of my neck for absolutely no good reason.

"It's a wrong number," I said, which was technically true and somehow entirely inadequate.

"A wrong number," she repeated, flat.

"He texted back and it just... we just talked. It's nothing."

Sandra set down a fork with theatrical care. She was forty three and had been divorced twice and had opinions about men that she shared freely and without apology. "A man you don't know texted you back after a wrong number at midnight and you just talked."

"Yes."

"And now you're smiling at his messages the next day."

"I'm not smiling."

"You were."

I picked up my cloth and wiped down the counter that didn't need wiping. "It's genuinely nothing, Sandra. He seems like a normal person. It's just, it's nice to talk to someone who doesn't want anything from me."

She was quiet for a second. Then, softer: "Yeah. I get that."

I did too, more than I'd meant to admit out loud.

The thing was, my life had a very specific shape to it, and there wasn't much room in that shape for anything new. It was built around Liam, his daycare schedule, his doctor's appointments, his strong opinions about toast crusts and which cup was the right cup for juice. It was built around the diner and the rent and the slow accumulation of small bills that never fully went away. It was built around my mother's occasional calls from Phoenix that left me feeling vaguely worse than before, and my friend group that had mostly drifted away in the years since Liam's father left, and the way a night out now meant a park at sunset instead of a bar.

I wasn't unhappy. I want to be clear about that. I loved Liam with a ferocity that sometimes scared me. I loved the regulars at the diner and the way the early morning light came through the big front windows and the satisfaction of a section that ran smoothly. I had a life. It was a small life and a hard one but it was mine and I'd built it myself.

I just hadn't talked to anyone, really talked to anyone, in a long time.

That night after I put Liam to bed and folded laundry and ignored the bills for another day, I picked up my phone.

Question, I typed to Marcel. Do you actually talk to people normally, or is it just because we're strangers?

The reply came in under two minutes. What do you mean?

I mean it's easy to talk to you. And I'm trying to figure out if that's a you thing or a strangers on the nternet thing.

A longer pause this time. I folded one of Liam's tiny shirts and waited.

Probably strangers on the internet, he wrote finally. I'm told I'm difficult in person.

Difficult how?

Cold. According to most people.

I thought about that. About the way he'd said hope you get the shift at midnight to someone he'd never met. "Cold" didn't quite fit that picture.

You don't seem cold, I typed.

You don't know me.

No, I agreed. But you texted a stranger back at midnight just to be kind. Cold people don't usually do that.

The pause before his next message was long enough that I thought I'd said too much. I was folding the second to last item in the basket when my phone lit up.

Maybe you make it easier, he wrote.

I sat with that for a moment, a tiny sock still in my hand, and felt something shift quietly in my chest. Something small and careful, like a door opening just a crack.

Get some sleep, Marcel, I wrote.

Goodnight, Holly.

I finished the laundry. Checked on Liam. Stood in my kitchen for a moment looking at the bills I still hadn't opened. They were still there. Nothing had changed.

But I went to bed that night feeling, for the second time in three days, like maybe not everything was as heavy as it had been before.