Strands

Maya found herself doing it again—twisting a loose strand of hair around her finger, staring at the Ethernet cable that snaked across David's apartment floor like a black vein. Six months after the funeral, and she still hadn't disconnected his wifi.

"You're haunting me," she whispered to the empty room.

Her palm pressed against the cool wall, exactly where she'd found him that morning. The coroner said cardiac arrest, sudden and painless. Maya suspected a broken heart, though the medical report didn't list such causes.

The cable modem's lights blinked rhythmically—green, orange, green—a heartbeat in plastic and photons. David had been network engineer, obsessed with connection, yet he'd died without leaving her a single note, no explanation, no farewell beyond the silent suddenness of his departure.

She opened his bottom desk drawer, the one she'd been avoiding. Inside lay his old palm pilot from the early 2000s, a relic he'd kept for sentimental reasons. Something about it representing the dawn of personal technology, he'd said. She'd teased him about hoarding useless gadgets.

Now it sat in her hand, smooth and black, charging through a frayed cable she'd found in a box of cables he'd organized with obsessive care—labelled, sorted, color-coded. Even his chaos had structure.

The device powered on. His calendar popped up, dated from three years ago. Doctor appointments. Lunch with coworkers. And one recurring entry she didn't recognize: Friday nights, 11 PM—simply marked "The Call."

Maya's fingers trembled. She scrolled through contacts. One name: Eleanor.

Her palm went cold. Eleanor. David's college sweetheart, the one who'd moved to Singapore eight years ago. The one he'd sworn meant nothing to him anymore.

Friday nights. When Maya had fallen asleep early, exhausted from her nursing shifts. When David had claimed he was catching up on work, gaming with friends.

The hair on her arms stood up. All those years, all that trust, all built on what? A weekly phone call across continents, a connection stretched through cables and satellites, a secret life hidden in plain sight.

But David was dead. Eleanor was half a world away. And Maya was alone in a room full of unanswered questions, holding a device that contained three years of betrayals she'd never known about.

She reached for the ethernet cable. Yanked it from the wall. The modem's lights died.

Some connections weren't worth keeping.