Chapter One: 12:07 A.M.
The first time a dead boy texted me, he asked if I still loved him.
I was lying in bed, scrolling through Instagram, when a message appeared from an unknown number.
Do you still sleep with the window open?
I glanced at the window beside my bed. It was closed, just as it had been every night since I was a child.
I asked who it was, but the reply made my stomach tighten.
Someone you promised you wouldn’t forget.
I blocked the number and tried to forget about it....People did strange things on the internet, and I wasn’t interested in becoming someone’s entertainment.
The next afternoon, I received a follow request from a boy named Alex.
His profile was almost empty. Three photographs, no tagged friends, and no information about his life. Something about him felt familiar, although I couldn’t understand why.
We started talking that evening.
At first, our conversations were ordinary. Music, childhood memories, bad days, and the little things people share when they don’t know how else to explain their loneliness. Slowly, he became part of my routine. He was the first person I wanted to message in the morning and the last person I waited for at night.
I never questioned why he always avoided video calls. There was always an excuse, and I always accepted it.
Maybe that was the first mistake I made....I fell in love with someone I had never properly seen.
A few weeks later, we met at a small café near the town library. He looked exactly like his photographs, but there was something strange about the way he looked at me. It wasn’t the nervousness of a boy meeting a girl he liked.
It was the expression of someone seeing a person he thought he had lost forever.
When I mentioned a nickname my family had stopped using years ago, he smiled sadly. I asked how he knew it, but he looked away before answering.
I should have been suspicious....Instead, I went home thinking about how beautiful his smile was.
That night, at exactly 12:07 a.m., the unknown number messaged me again.
Don’t fall in love with Alex.
I stared at the screen, my heart beating faster.
Another message appeared.
He isn’t who you think he is.
I opened Alex’s chat and asked him about November 14, the date mentioned in the next message.
For almost a minute, he didn’t reply.
Then three words appeared on my screen.
Who told you?
I read them several times.
For the first time, I wondered whether the boy I was falling in love with had been waiting for me long before I ever knew his name.
