The messages started on a Monday.
I did not recognise the number. No name attached to it, no introduction, no context. Just a single line that appeared on my screen while I was sitting in the library with a book open in my lap that I had not been reading for the better part of an hour.
He is asking questions about you.
I read it three times.
Then I looked up at the room around me, at the bookshelves and the evening light and the quiet that had become, over the past weeks, something I had stopped noticing because I had started to simply live inside it. I looked at the message again.
I deleted it.
I told myself it was nothing. A wrong number. Someone was deliberately vague for reasons that had nothing to do with me. I told myself this with the same firm internal voice I had been using
