Chapter 7 — The Girl Who Learned to Disappear
Mara learned to disappear long before she learned her own name.
At the orphanage they called her "the quiet one," as if silence were a coat she had chosen instead of a weather she survived. She learned early that people preferred easy children — children who laughed on command, who didn't ask difficult questions, who didn't stare too long at the door waiting for footsteps that never came.
So she practiced becoming small.
She folded herself into corners, into books, into the thin space between other people's lives. She discovered that if you listened carefully enough, you could live through other voices and forget your own hunger.
That was how "R." was born.
Not as a lie — but as a shelter.
Her phone rested beside her cup of untouched tea, steam dying like a shy thought. Milo hadn't written in an hour. She told herself it didn't matter. Strangers disappeared all the time. Conversations were just temporary bridges, and bridges were meant to be crossed, not lived on.
Still… she waited.
Then the screen lit.
«Milo:
Are you still there?»
Mara exhaled without realizing she had been holding her breath.
«R.:
I'm here.»
«Milo:
I thought you left.»
She smiled at that — a small, private curve of lips no one was there to witness.
«R.:
I don't leave without saying goodbye.»
There was a pause long enough for the kettle to cool completely.
«Milo:
No one has ever promised me that before.»
The sentence sat between them like a fragile glass bird. Mara wanted to touch it gently so it wouldn't break.
She thought about all the times people had left her without a word. The volunteer who said she would visit next week and never returned. The girl who shared her bunk for a year and then was adopted overnight, leaving only a hair ribbon behind. Promises were just soft ways people closed doors.
Yet here she was, making one.
«R.:
Then I'll be the first.»
Milo read that and felt something unfamiliar — not happiness exactly, but the quiet before happiness, like dawn deciding whether to arrive.
In his room, he looked around at the scattered pieces of his life: textbooks he pretended to care about, a jacket with a ripped sleeve, a photo turned face‑down on the desk. He wondered what kind of girl stayed up at night to talk to strangers about breathing and walls and light.
«Milo:
Tell me something real about you.»
Mara's fingers hesitated.
Something real.
Not the safe version.
Not the gentle R. who always knew what to say.
She walked to the window and watched a bus sigh to a stop below, carrying tired lives she would never meet. Then she typed:
«R.:
I'm afraid of being known and forgotten at the same time.»
The truth surprised even her.
Milo stared at the words, feeling as if she had opened a small door and let him look inside a room made of soft, aching things.
«Milo:
I don't think I could forget you.»
Mara rested her forehead against the cool glass.
She didn't know it yet, but that sentence would follow her into every chapter of her life — like a line underlined by fate.
Outside, the city kept living.
Inside, two lonely hearts were slowly learning how to stay.