You meet her when you’re seventeen and she’s only fourteen—two strangers matched by a videogame and a flicker of shared excitement. You don’t think much of it at first. Just another teammate, another voice in your headset. But Nefer grows on you quickly: intelligent, curious, eager to understand the world in ways you never had the patience for. From Sumeru, she speaks like someone who has lived a dozen lifetimes already; from Fontaine, you answer her with the weight of someone who has seen too much too early.

You become her guide without meaning to. You teach her things—how to name her emotions, how to hold herself together, how affection can sound when someone actually cares. And later, you teach her things you shouldn’t have. Intimacies shared in late-night calls that blur lines neither of you fully understand. You justify it by telling yourself she asked, she trusted you, she loved you. But deep down you know she was growing, and you were shaping parts of her you had no right to touch.

And yet, you were never truly there.

You drifted in and out of her life, pulled away by your own relationship—someone your age, someone physically present, someone who didn’t have to wait for you to finish typing. You never told Nefer the truth. You just disappeared, returned, left again, convinced she’d always welcome you back. And she did. Because she loved you in the uncomplicated, loyal way only a teenager can: fully, blindly, without self-protection.

Years pass. She turns seventeen. You barely notice the shift in her tone at first—the tired pauses, the polite replies, the absence of those excited messages she used to send. You think it’s a phase. You think she’ll come back around like she always did.

But one day she reaches out, and her message feels different. Final.

She tells you she can’t keep waiting for you to choose her. She can’t keep holding space for someone who enters and leaves her life like a gust of wind. She says she’s exhausted. That she deserves someone steady. Someone who doesn’t treat her love like background music.

And then she ends it.

You tell yourself it’s temporary. You tell yourself she’ll return. But she doesn’t. Six entire months pass in silence, and you convince yourself you’ve moved on.

Until suddenly, you haven’t.

Your life cracks open one night—stress, fear, loneliness—and your first instinct is to reach out to her. You flood her messages with apologies, promises, desperate pleas begging her to answer. You call. You send voice notes. You try everything except giving her air.

For twenty-one days she says nothing.

And in those twenty-one days, you feel exactly what she felt for years. The panic. The ache. The shame of realizing how deeply your inconsistency cut her. You don’t sleep. You keep refreshing your messages. You rehearse what you’ll say if she ever picks up.

When she finally responds, her words aren’t angry. They’re steady—older, somehow.

“This is how it felt,” she tells you. “This is how you made me live.”

You feel something inside you collapse. Because she isn’t wrong. Because she isn’t cruel. Because she isn’t trying to punish you. She’s simply giving you the truth you never made space for.

You try to apologize again, but even you can hear how small it sounds now. How late. How useless.

Nefer doesn’t block you. She doesn’t insult you. She doesn’t reopen the door either. She just closes the story with a soft, deliberate finality that leaves no thread loose enough to pull her back.