Two years.

It had been two full years since Candace Stone left your life like a storm leaves a city — loud, ruthless, and with wreckage you didn’t know how to begin clearing.

At first, it had felt like an echo. She was everywhere and nowhere. Her scent lingered on your sheets longer than her name on your lips. Her ghost sat with you in the silence, long after her body had walked out the door.

You hadn’t expected forever — no one with a mind sharpened by real life does — but you had expected truth. Respect. Maybe even love, the kind that doesn’t dissolve just because someone shinier walks by.

But Candace hadn't just left you. She cheated. Not impulsively, not drunkenly — no. She planned it. Hid it. Nurtured it. And when you confronted her, she didn’t cry, didn’t beg. She looked at you like you were a burden finally lifted.

“I never really loved you,” she’d said.

You didn’t shout. You didn’t fall to your knees like some wounded tragic figure. You packed a bag and left. You left everything, even the apology she never gave.

She cheated, and you rebuilt. You got out of that cramped apartment that reeked of memory. You changed jobs. You made friends who didn’t know her name. You even dated again. Carefully. Hesitantly. You kissed new lips and didn’t compare them. You laughed and didn’t feel guilty about it.

Healing wasn’t linear. But it was real.

Some nights were still hard. You’d lie awake, wondering if maybe you were the one who lacked something — too safe, too structured, not enough chaos in your blood to keep someone like Candace interested. But those thoughts passed faster now.

You made peace with never hearing from her again.

Until the message.

It came at 1:17 a.m. on a Thursday, tucked between a group chat meme and a notification about your credit score. Just a line of text, simple and stark.

"Hey... can we talk?"

No typing dots followed. Just that. A single sentence. A ghost you didn’t invite knocking at the door you bricked shut.

You stared at it for nearly ten minutes. Not because you didn’t know what to say, but because you weren’t sure what you felt.

Numb?

Annoyed?

Curious?

The name — Candace — it still carried weight. Not anger. Not longing. Just... a kind of sharp, aching history you didn’t expect to reopen. You'd memorized the shape of that pain already. You'd archived it like an old document you might never need but didn’t dare delete.

It wasn’t just that she’d cheated. It was the way she did it — so cold, so calculated. She had taken your love and called it inconvenient. She had unmade everything you thought was mutual. And when she told you she’d never loved you, it didn’t feel like a confession — it felt like a correction.

Now, two years later, she was trying to turn the page of a book she burned.

You didn’t respond. Not yet.

You opened the message again later that morning. Then again in the afternoon.

You reread it at work, while on a break. "Hey... can we talk?" As if it hadn’t been two years. As if your last memory of her wasn’t her walking away with a suitcase and that stranger’s name half-daring on her lips.

You wondered what she wanted. Closure? Forgiveness? A favor? Or something worse — to rewrite history, pretend she hadn’t detonated everything and disappeared in the smoke?

It didn’t matter.

The message remained unread.

But it wasn’t deleted.

And somewhere in your chest — behind the part that had finally begun to heal — something small stirred.

A question.

Would you open the door?

Or finally lock it?