The first email of the day landed at 6:19 a.m. Theo opened it on his phone before his feet hit the apartment floor, brain already humming through the possible bug reports that had waited overnight. The subject line was exactly the kind he hated—“Quick question about the new load balancer?”—but the message itself was brief, respectful, and easy to solve. He had the answer typed out before the electric kettle even finished its cycle.

  By 7:02, he was at his desk at Apex Technologies. Security hadn’t even finished wiping down the glass entrance doors, and already Theo’s hands were a blur over the keyboard, his focus dialed to something just short of aggressive. His code ran clean, the test suites passed with almost comical speed, and every comment in his pull requests was met with the polite, faintly smug tone of someone who had double-checked his work three times before submitting.

  It was the best three-week run of productivity he’d had since joining the company, and the metrics backed him up. “Ticket resolution up 65%,” his team lead wrote in the weekly digest. “If Wilson keeps this up, we’re installing a shrine to him in the break room.” The joke landed exactly as it should: half-serious, half-expectant, as if everyone had quietly decided to let Theo work out his new personality on his own terms.

  He settled into the routine of the morning, the code unspooling in his head like a song on repeat, every function another verse. The only interruptions were the periodic buzzes of his phone—sometimes Slack, sometimes an automated system alert, but every so often, a message from Kristina.

  This one came at 8:47, just as he was lining up a particularly tricky database migration. The notification lit up his lock screen: a photo, no caption. He swiped it open, careful to keep the phone angled away from the desk’s sightline.

  The image was a close-up of someone’s hand—her hand, he was pretty sure—wrapped around a mug of coffee, the nails painted a new shade he hadn’t seen before. In the background, a blurry hint of a palm tree against a window streaked with sunlight.

  He smiled, quick and involuntary, then caught himself and cleared his throat. No one in the row of engineers noticed. Theo’s role was, if nothing else, to keep his feelings small and efficient, like the lines of code he wrote.

  He typed back: “Excellent nail game. Coffee looks suspiciously artisanal.”

  A reply within thirty seconds: “You wound me. It’s gas station coffee. I’m embracing my roots.”

  He let his hands rest on the desk, flexing the tension out, then forced himself to turn back to the screen. The database migration could wait another five minutes. He scrolled back through the last week’s thread: memes, blurry photos of half-eaten pastries, a snapshot of her sneakers propped up on a hotel lobby table, annotated: “Living the dream.”

  He wanted, desperately, to see her in person again. The Vegas trip loomed like a moon on the horizon, impossibly far and blindingly close at once. It had become the organizing principle of his life, the thing every other plan deferred to.

  At exactly noon, Marcus appeared at the edge of Theo’s cubicle, arms crossed, hair tousled, mouth set in the kind of determined line that meant “I’m going to annoy you and I’m not leaving until I win.”

  “Lunch,” Marcus announced. “Now.”

  “I’m midway through a hotfix,” Theo said, without looking up.

  “Pause it. You need protein.”

  Theo let himself finish the current statement, then hit save and closed the laptop. “Only if we’re not talking about the Vegas trip again.”

  Marcus’s eyebrows shot up. “No promises. Also, Elena and Darren are already at the table. Come on, you’re late.”

  They wound their way to the cafeteria, where Elena was arranging plastic utensils into a miniature grid and Darren was halfway through a tray of dumplings. The four of them sat in their usual formation, Theo and Marcus on one side, Elena and Darren on the other, like a court of skeptical jurors.

  “Gentlemen,” Elena said, voice crisp. “You’re late. We started without you.”

  “Because you have no respect for ritual,” Marcus shot back, then gestured to Theo. “This man has been running the table at work for weeks and refuses to celebrate it.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Darren offered a noncommittal nod. “We could order a cake. Or just, like, light a donut on fire.”

  Theo smiled. “I appreciate the support. But I’d rather just get the code finished before the trip.”

  “You’re so weirdly responsible,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “Like a child prodigy, but with less self-destruction.”

  Elena cut in, “Speaking of prodigies, how’s the texting romance going? Has ‘Kristy’ sent you any more cryptic updates?”

  There was an edge to the question, playful but not entirely gentle.

  Theo leaned back. “It’s fine,” he said, and left it there, but everyone at the table knew the move. They’d been pulling at this thread for weeks, ever since Marcus spotted the uptick in “random grinning at phone” behavior and Elena, with the efficiency of a forensic auditor, mapped the time stamps to an exact window of Kristina’s presumed activity.

  Darren, who rarely entered the fray, looked up. “Are you going to introduce us, or are we just supposed to hear about her from Slack notifications?”

  Theo bristled, then forced himself to relax. “It’s not like that. She’s just busy.”

  Marcus pounced. “You realize this is textbook, right? The steady escalation, the withholding of details, the mysterious ‘consulting job’ that never gets explained. My dude, you’re being catfished.”

  Elena rolled her eyes. “I believe him. I think she’s real.”

  Theo blinked. “What?”

  She shrugged. “They spent some time together in person. I didn’t dig, but that's not something you can fake.”

  A silence, as everyone waited for Theo to react.

  He tried to play it off, but the heat crept up his neck anyway. “You guys are incredible,” he said, half-admiring, half-mortified.

  Marcus nodded, satisfied. “All we’re saying is, we want to meet her. In person. Not through, like, abstract meme warfare.”

  Elena softened. “We’re happy for you, Theo. Just…this has been a lot. You’re not yourself lately.”

  Theo wanted to protest, but the words failed him. Instead, he let the moment stretch, the distant hum of the cafeteria washing over their little island of awkwardness.

  Darren piped up, “We could do a pre-Vegas hangout. Group dinner, no pressure. Unless you’re planning to show up with her at the concert and just stun us all at once.”

  “That’s not—” Theo began, then stopped. Maybe it was exactly what he was planning.

  Elena sipped her iced tea, eyes on him. “You’re meeting her there, right? That’s why you’ve been so weird about travel plans?”

  Theo nodded, slow. “She’s working. But we’re…yeah. We’re meeting up. After.”

  Marcus leaned in, voice dropping to a mock-whisper. “So what’s the play? You gonna do the ‘accidental’ meet-up at the bar, or are you bringing her straight to the afterparty?”

  Darren made a noise like a game show buzzer. “That’s dangerous. What if it’s awkward?”

  Theo shrugged, not sure how to answer. The truth was, he hadn’t thought past the initial moment—the image of Kristy materializing in front of him, the two of them standing face-to-face with nothing left to hide behind. He wanted it more than anything, but the thought of it also made his chest go tight.

  “She’s real,” he said, and tried to make it sound definitive. “You’ll see.”

  Elena set down her fork. “We’re not judging, Theo. We just want you to be happy. If this makes you happy, that’s all that matters.”

  Marcus, for once, let the moment rest. He scooped up his tray, then added, “Just don’t get murdered by a stranger in Vegas. We need you for the next release cycle.”

  Theo grinned. “Duly noted.”

  The group fell into familiar rhythms again—office gossip, Marcus’s plans to get banned from a casino, Darren’s hot take on the upcoming UFC title defense. But even as the conversation spun out, Theo felt the residual tension under the table, the way everyone kept glancing at his phone whenever it buzzed.

  When lunch ended, and the others peeled off toward their respective afternoon meetings, Theo lingered behind. He scrolled back through the photos Kristy had sent him—each one carefully framed, her face always half-in, half-out of focus, as if she preferred to be glimpsed rather than seen. He noticed, for the first time, that none of the selfies were straight-on; always a reflection in a window, a shadow at the edge of a mirror, a set of lips pursed just out of frame. Even her voice notes were careful, sometimes pitch-shifted with a filter, always playful but never fully exposed.

  He wondered if maybe his friends were right to be suspicious, if maybe he was chasing something that didn’t exist outside of his own longing.

  But then his phone buzzed again—a new message. This one with a video: Kristy, blurry and backlit, dancing for five seconds in front of a hotel TV blaring daily news, singing off-key into a hairbrush. The file ended with a hand covering the lens and a burst of laughter.

  He watched it three times, grinning so hard his face hurt.

  If it was a dream, it was a good one. He’d ride it as long as he could.

  The rest of the day ran on autopilot. He crushed three more bugs, cleared his Jira queue, and even volunteered for the 7 p.m. deployment window. At every interval, his thoughts drifted back to her. To the idea of her. To the reality he was pretty sure was waiting for him, just out of reach.

  When he got home, he tossed his keys on the entry table and collapsed on the sofa. He texted Marcus: “Drink’s are on. Next week. You can interrogate her yourself.”

  Marcus replied instantly: “YES. I’m wearing a suit.”

  Elena chimed in on the group chat: “Play nice, Marcus. Or she’ll dump Theo and we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  Darren added a string of alien emojis.

  Theo smiled, muted the thread, and turned his phone over on the coffee table. He let the silence fill the room, let himself feel the fluttery anticipation that had, somehow, become the new background noise of his life.

  She’s real, he told himself. She’s real. You’ll see.

  He closed his eyes, pictured the Vegas lights, and waited for the next message to arrive.