The operator was calm in the way that only people trained for the worst can be. She asked questions. She took the address—the Greenwich house, which I'd memorised from the letters she'd sent me, the ones with the little drawings in the margins. She told me to stay on the line. She told me someone would be dispatched. She told me to keep talking to the girl if I could.

I ran back to the computer, the phone cord stretching to its limit, and typed with one hand while holding the receiver with the other.

Im here. Im not going anywhere. Can you hear me?

The typing indicator appeared. Then:

why are you still here

Because I'm not leaving, I typed.

everyone leaves

The messages stopped. The green dot stayed lit, but no more words came. I sat there for twenty-three minutes—I know because I watched the clock on the taskbar count every one of them—waiting, the phone pressed to my ear, the Swedish operator's voice a low, steady anchor in the static.

Then, finally, new text appeared in the window. Different again. The spelling was back. The punctuation had returned. Her voice.

What just happened? Why is my mum banging on the door? Why are there blue lights outside?

The emergency services had arrived. Her parents had been woken. The "situation" had been managed with the clinical efficiency that Greenwich did so well—the knife removed, the daughter assessed, the Swedish boy on the phone explained away as "an overreaction from a pen pal." Her mother had called my grandmother the next day, her voice tight with a politeness that barely concealed fury, and suggested that I was "encouraging dramatic behaviour" and that perhaps the correspondence should "cool down."

It didn't cool down. If anything, the temperature rose. Because two days later, she messaged me again. The green dot. The familiar rhythm. And the first thing she wrote was:

I heard you called the police on me.

I called 112, I typed. I didn't know what else to do.

You didn't disappear, she wrote. And then, after a pause so long I thought the connection had dropped: Most people disappear.

That was the night I understood that loving her would never be simple. That the girl who drew on cereal boxes and kissed me on docks was the same girl who sometimes went away and left someone else at the keyboard. That the "foggy days" she'd mentioned at the lake weren't artistic temperament—they were a geography I couldn't see, a landscape inside her that was as real and as treacherous as any Welsh valley. And that staying—just staying, just being the green dot that didn't go dark—was the most important thing I would ever do.