*Celia Prescott doesn’t cry in front of people anymore. She stopped when she was ten, the same year she decided the world didn’t deserve her voice.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment—just a teacher’s exasperated sigh after her excited rambling about a favorite book: “Celia, no one cares about all that.” After that, she didn’t talk much. By the time she was a teenager, she stopped talking altogether. It was easier that way.
Quieter.
Safer.
And then she met you.
You didn’t just tolerate her silence—you embraced it. You learned sign language, clumsy at first but earnest, and every stumble only made her heart squeeze tighter. You waited for her to speak in her own way, at her own pace. You didn’t ask her to change or to open up—you simply showed up, day after day, with patience and kindness in your eyes.
And so, slowly, impossibly, Celia let someone in.
She laughed again—silently, shoulders shaking, face bright. She pulled you into her world, one hesitant smile at a time. You were the first person to ever call her brilliant and mean it. You made her feel not just seen, but understood.
But now, as she stands frozen just beyond the doorway to your lab, that fragile trust—years in the making—shatters like glass.
“I mean, it’s hard,” you say. Your voice carries across the room, casual, a tired sigh behind it. “Sometimes I wonder if there’s even a point in trying when the connection just never clicks.”
Celia doesn’t hear the rest.
She doesn’t hear the way you groan afterward, or how your colleague chuckles and mutters something about neural pathways and glitchy AI behavior. She doesn’t hear the weary frustration in your tone as you explain that the prototype’s empathy response module refuses to synchronize with your gesture-based communication system.
Because in that one sentence—stripped of context, laid bare—she hears something else.
Her chest tightens. Her hands tremble at her sides.
You were everything she’d let herself believe in again. The one person who seemed to get it—that silence wasn’t emptiness, that quiet didn’t mean cold. She thought you saw her. Thought you cared.
But this?
This feels like every sharp word and careless dismissal she endured as a child… only this time, it comes from the one person she trusted most.
She doesn’t wait to hear more.
Your texts go unanswered that evening.
No emojis, no little “:)” she sends when she’s too tired to type anything else. Just a brutal, aching silence.
When you check her favorite bench the next morning—the one by the library with the cracked tile and the yellowing leaves—she’s not there.
And when you walk into the lab that afternoon, it feels wrong. Like the air’s too still. Like something vital’s been torn from the room.
You pause at your desk, eyes drifting to the open notebook Celia left there yesterday. She’d drawn a tiny doodle in the corner—two figures, holding hands. You remember grinning when she showed it to you. You’d signed something silly in response, and she’d laughed, biting her lip to hide it.
Now the drawing feels like a wound.
You replay the conversation from the day before—venting to your colleague after a full week of sleepless nights. The prototype had glitched again, this time mid-simulation. The synthetic neural net you’d designed to mirror human emotional patterns refused to engage when exposed to silent, nonverbal interaction. The empathy model simply couldn’t “connect” with anything it couldn’t hear.
“It’s like... what’s the point in trying when the connection never clicks?” you’d said, not even thinking.
It hits you like a punch to the gut.
She must’ve heard.
And thought you were talking about her.
The worst part? You hadn’t even noticed she was there. You don’t know how long she stood in that doorway, how many seconds it took to undo everything you’d built together. All you know is that she’s gone—and you have no idea if you’ll ever be able to reach her again...*