On the last night, she kissed me on the dock—a quick, fierce kiss that tasted of cheap wine and lake water and the specific bravery of being fifteen. I kissed her back, and the world reduced itself to the sound of water lapping against wood and the smell of her hair and the impossible softness of the moment. We exchanged MSN addresses on the backs of our hands with a borrowed Sharpie, because that was how you kept someone in 2005. You wrote them on your skin and hoped the ink survived the shower.

The camp ended. She went back to Greenwich. I went back to Östersund. And for the next few months, we lived inside a screen.

Every night, without fail, the green dot appeared beside her name on MSN Messenger. The conversation would start the way it always did—some small, bright observation about her day, a sketch she'd scanned and sent as a file transfer that took four minutes to download, a song lyric she'd been turning over in her head. I'd respond with my own fragments—the colour of the snow that day, a bad joke I'd heard at school, something I'd read that made me think of the cereal box drawing. We built a world in that chat window, line by line, the way you build a wall—each message a brick, each late night a layer of mortar.

Sometimes we'd move to the phone. The calls were expensive—international rates, the kind that made my mother's eyebrows climb when the bill arrived—so we rationed them like water in a drought. Fifteen minutes here. Twenty there. Her voice through the receiver was always slightly different from the voice in my head when I read her messages. Warmer. More vulnerable. The typing gave her armour; the phone stripped it away.

It happened on a Tuesday night in late November, about three months after Västerås. I was at my desk, the blue glow of the monitor the only light in my room, the rest of the house asleep. We'd been talking for an hour—the usual drift of conversation, art and music and the quiet comedy of our separate lives. She'd been telling me about a lecture at school, something about Frida Kahlo and "the body as landscape," and her messages had been sharp and funny, the way they always were when she was properly herself.

Then the rhythm changed.

I'd gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water—two minutes, maybe three. When I came back to the keyboard, the chat window had filled with new messages. But they weren't hers. Or rather, they were from her account, but the voice was wrong. The spelling was different. The punctuation had vanished. The sentences were short and blunt, stripped of all her usual wit.

I'm not her she went away shes not here right now whos this