He laughed it off, said he'd try to reply faster when he saw my messages.
He never pinned me.
When I brought it up again, he sighed and said he had too many work contacts for pinning to matter.
I let him talk me out of it. But the gray feeling stayed.
It wasn't until much, much later that I understood what that feeling was.
The quiet ache of not mattering enough.
Their chat history looked harmless.
Glenda shared a sunrise; Chester sent back a rainbow after the rain.
Nothing that would look wrong if anyone else read it—every message carefully inside the line marked "friends."
But that kind of idle, pointless back-and-forth had disappeared from my life with Chester a long time ago.
Our messages had been reduced to a handful of cold templates.
Working late? Have you eaten? Did the contract get signed?
I was about to close the chat when I accidentally tapped into his saved messages.
There was a pinned voice note from Glenda.
I pressed play. A bright, clear female voice filled the room.
"Chester, if you hadn't been so sharp-tongued back then, maybe we wouldn't have missed our chance."
The timestamp was three years ago.
The same day Chester lost his voice.