Digital Ghosts

The iPhone sat on her desk like a surveillance device, which, in a way, it was. Maria watched the screen light up every three minutes—him: Can we talk? him: I miss you. him: Are you there?

She'd become a zombie of her own making, moving through the corporate corridors in a daze, answering emails on autopilot, smiling at Dale from Accounting while her heart performed its own slow, quiet death. Four years together, dissolved because he couldn't keep it in his pants—or rather, couldn't keep it out of his coworker.

Her lunch sat untouched: wilted spinach leaves curling into themselves like dying secrets, a testament to her half-assed attempts at self-improvement. Eat healthy. Move on. Be the person who eats salad and doesn't check her ex-fiancé's location five times an hour.

The office had become a stage where she performed normalcy. But she knew things now—the spy in her had awakened. She knew that Sarah in HR left at 2:45 PM every Tuesday. She knew the exact timestamp when Dale's status changed to 'In a Meeting' and didn't change back for forty-seven minutes. She'd become fluent in the micro-betrayals that lived in digital footprints, in calendar invites, in the way certain names appeared in certain email threads.

She went to the kitchenette and filled her glass with water from the cooler. Her hands trembled. Cool water against her palm—something real, something immediate.

"You okay, Maria?" It was Sarah. Standing there. Smiling.

Maria looked at this woman who had everything she'd lost. The spinach in her stomach turned sour. "Fine," she said. "Just needed some water."

She walked back to her desk. The iPhone lit up again. A photo this time—a sunset they'd watched in Mexico three years ago. Underneath: I remember everything.

Some ghosts, Maria realized, don't haunt houses. They haunt screens. And the living dead aren't the ones who've died—they're the ones left behind, walking through their days, checking their phones, waiting for messages that can never fix what's broken.