The morning after
The screenshot stayed on Prue's screen long after she'd stopped looking at it.
A single screenshot
Or maybe thousand emotions disguised as one.
Before she could gather her thoughts, another notification flashed.
Pace.
"Is this the reason you wanted a break-up so bad?"
Her fingers froze.
"I didn't cheat on you."
The reply came almost instantly.
"Really?"
"I told you long before that I wanted to end things. You just never accepted it."
The chat turned into a blur of accusations and explanations. Neither of them listened. They only replied.
She wasn't trying to prove she was innocent anymore.
She was trying to prove that she had never wanted to hurt him.
He wasn't trying to understand anymore.
He was trying to understand why it hurt so much.
By the time the conversation ended, both of them had said more than they meant to.
But there was still one conversation left.
She opened Vaughn's chat.
"Did you send him our private chat?"
A few moments later, a reply appeared.
" I thought it would help"
"It made everything worse"
"That wasn't my intention"
The typing bubble appeared.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
Nothing came after that.
Another notification interrupted the silence.
Pace.
Just one sentence.
"Thanks for your cooperation of two weeks."
She stared at it. This breakup text was meant to relieve her; it didn't though.
She placed her phone face down and walked out for dinner.She answered every question at home with a nod.She barely remembered what she'd eaten.
The weekend disappeared in silence.
Her phone remained switched off.
For two days, the world could wait.
When she finally switched it back on, the first message waiting for her wasn't an apology.
It was from Pace.
"Can you do me a favour?"
"What"
"Do you have Vaughn's current number?"
She frowned.
"The only number I know is the one you already have."
"Never mind."
That was the end of it.
Or so she thought.
That evening, guilt settled in where anger had been.
She opened both chats and wrote two paragraphs..
One for the boy she'd broken.
One for the boy who had tried to fix things and only made them worse.
Pace replied before the night was over.
Vaughn never did.
One grey tick.
It stayed that way until she finally closed her phone again.
