"I’m leaving the terminal. Give me twenty minutes."
Leo typed a reply. Deleted it. Typed again. Deleted.
His phone buzzed. A message from Mia: "You coming tonight? It's been three weeks."
That was the night Elena left.
He didn’t reply. Instead, he pulled up the old server logs from the night everything changed. Timestamps scrolled past. 23:14:02 — connection established. 23:14:09 — connection aborted. Local system. Not a remote failure. Not a hacker. His own machine had pulled the plug.