Maybe She Never Existed

 

The coffee queue smelled like burnt sugar and office small talk. I held my cup like a talisman while Tara swiped a sugar packet between two fingers, watching the steam rise as if it might carry answers.

“Neeraj says it’s harmless,” I said, sliding my phone across the table toward her. “But I don’t know.”

Her brows lifted. She read the single, stark line on my screen and blinked, as if the words had slapped her awake.

If you talk to other women here, I will kill you.
From: unknown.sender19@protonmail.com
To: varun.p@brightline.com

She laughed once—short, a little disbelieving. “Dramatic,” she said. “Very dramatic.”

“It arrived to my office mail,” I said. “Was directed there. Not spoofed from some corporate server. Private address, anonymous routing.”

Tara folded her napkin, the movement precise. “Someone’s playing games.”

“Someone’s doing it well,” I said. “And someone knows my schedule. The times line up with when I actually talk to people.”

She tapped the screen. “Maybe it’s a prank. Maybe it’s someone who thinks they’re funny.”

“Maybe,” I echoed. My voice had the flatness of a man who had stopped expecting anything reasonable from the world. “Or maybe it’s not a joke.”

She sipped, eyes on me. Her face was a map of concentration—small creases beside the mouth, a way of catching light at the cheekbone that I’d noticed before but never memorized.

“Let’s keep a log,” she said. “Just in case.”

We started a ledger that afternoon—timestamps, short phrases, what I’d been doing before each message. Tara wrote in a neat script, circling words I didn’t think to notice: tone, cadence, pronouns. She preferred to sit by the window in the canteen, where the glass made everything look like a movie set and the light was kinder.

The next message arrived just before lunch. The subject line was blank this time.

You smiled at her today. Careful.

I frowned. The log showed I’d smiled at Meera from HR about a new policy. Small, professional. Inoffensive.

“She’s watching the small stuff,” Tara said, tapping the phone with one fingernail. “That’s not random. That’s intent.”

We began to suspect everyone in the office in turns. 

Nisha from design—silver hoops, loud laugh—became a plausible villain because she wore silver hoops. The intern who always lingered in the reception area with a parcel was suspicious because he lingered. Even the cleaning crew’s schedule became something that could carry secrets if you chose to make narratives out of it. We built theories like children building forts: elaborate, convincing within the wooden walls we’d made.

At night, I would find another line in my inbox and forward it to Tara with a single word: Now. She’d reply with a question mark, or a time to meet. Our private ritual felt like an investigation, and the investigation felt like a place where two people could spend time without being accountable to the rest of the planet.

“You should tell IT,” she’d say in a tone that was equal parts reasonable and theatrical.

“I don’t want a whole department on my life,” I said. “I want—” I stopped. I didn’t know what I wanted. Maybe someone to say it wasn’t real. Maybe someone to follow up the thread.

Tara’s pen scraped across the paper. “We’ll do it small,” she promised. “Neeraj can run a trace. Quietly.”

Neeraj liked puzzles. He liked coffee in oversize mugs and the smell of ozone after a server room had been opened for inspection. He always had the patience of the mildly amused. He said the right things, ran the right commands, and made the thing we feared look like a line on a terminal.

“Looks like those emails were sent from a computer right here in our office,” he said. “Someone who sits close to you, maybe even logs in around the same time as you.”

“Can we find out who?”

He shrugged, his smile easy. “Not exactly. Whoever’s behind this knows how to hide. But don’t worry—we’ll keep an eye.”

The messages mounted, and their tone sharpened in ways that made the hair on my arms stand up. Don’t make her jealous. She’s not one of them. Stop looking at other women. Each one pressed like a thumb into a bruise—the more I read, the more my mind assembled pictures of a person who lived to notice me, who took small civic interest in my conversations.

We watched faces at the coffee machine. We timed conversations. Tara’s notebook thickened with arrows and names like a detective’s corkboard. At the back of the canteen, over rushed lunches, she’d recite linguistic patterns like a linguist in love: “Repetition of ‘she’—not casual. Possessive language in short bursts. The sender wants to be the person who owns you. Jealousy code.”

Sometimes she caught me looking at her while she annotated a message and I would feel my insides rearrange the way a person’s furniture might be moved to create room for another body. The closeness was a small, steady ache I learned to carry. I had not told her that. I had not allowed myself to. It would have been a confession in a ministry of confessions.

Weeks went by like a film burned on loops. The office turned through its days. We traded theory for theory. We missed a few dinners; our texts held a private cadence—Message? Now?—and laughs that were edged with worry.

Then Neeraj called me one morning after the stand-up. He was usually efficient with facts, but that day there was a tilt of something else—unease, or embarrassed amusement.

“Can you come to my desk?” he asked.

He pointed to the terminal and I leaned in. He had pulled audit logs: senders, relay hops, session IDs. The lines scrolled like faint rain.

“See this?” he said. “These emails were sent from someone inside the office network. I can’t tell you the exact computer, but whoever it is, they’re right here with us.”

“Any clue who?”

Neeraj hesitated. “There’s one thing—it looks like all the messages came from the same login session as another employee. Tara’s. Maybe someone used her system, maybe it’s a fluke. I’m not saying it’s her, but... that’s what the records show.”

My mind tried to fast-forward through cliché. Tara? That made no sense. She’d been beside me for weeks, scribbling, leaning in, helping decode messages. She had offered me a pencil the first day, without thinking, when mine fell under my chair. How could she be—

“Could be an accident,” Neeraj added quickly. “You know how these systems overlap.”

“Yeah,” I said. The word sat in my mouth like a coin I couldn’t swallow.

I left the server room and the fluorescent lights felt sharper than before. I met Tara in the stairwell—a place chosen for its anonymity—and for a few heartbeats I considered doing what men in novels do: confront, accuse, demand truth. Instead I found my voice small.

“Did you—?” I began.

She looked up at me with the sort of complete openness that made it almost unbearable. “I told Neeraj all this morning I could help. Asked him to check logs. Why?”

“You were logged in,” I said. The words were awkward, clumsy in the mouth. “Your session shows up in the trace.”

Tara blinked like someone realizing they’d been splashed. For a second she was still. Then she laughed—a short, astonished sound—and it had in it the little tremor of a person about to say something ridiculous.

“Oh God,” she said. “You serious?”

“Yes.” I saw her fingers twitch against her notebook.

She swallowed. The building’s metal stairwell made a hollow echo for her breath. “Neeraj must have traced some shared session token. Could be my laptop, could be a cached credential from when I configured the printer.”

I wanted to believe her. I nodded, because that was what you do when a person who matters to you offers plausible mechanics instead of confession.

We went back to our desks and, for the rest of the day, I watched her as if watching might rearrange certainty into proof. She was calm. She forwarded me a screenshot of a server error she had just noticed and quipped about database caching. Her laughter over an internal joke sounded like a bell in my ear.

That evening, a message arrived in my inbox. It was different: no threat, no possession. Just a line that felt like an observation.

I saw you look at her today. Don’t.

I read it once. Twice. Something in the grammar suggested intimacy in a way the previous lines had not. I forwarded the mail to Tara without thinking. She opened it, then looked up with an expression I could no longer parse.

“Who else had access to your machine?” she asked.

“Only you,” I said, then immediately wanted to take it back. That was not true. Plenty of people could have had physical access in transit. But the sentence had been out.

She laughed again, not the astonished laugh in the stairwell, but a softer sound that felt embarrassed and raw. “Varun,” she said, “this is getting ridiculous.”

We kept investigating. We kept making lists. We kept noticing details—the way a colleague tucked hair behind an ear, the way a receptionist always seemed to be the first to know the office’s little news. We were detectives inhabiting an office noir, the rules of our game elastic enough to hold both paranoia and companionship.

Then, one rainy Thursday, everything shifted with the bluntness of a dropped plate.

Neeraj found me by the pantry. His face was half-smile, half-apology. He tapped a printout into my hand. “I checked again,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s definite now. Every message came from Tara’s account. You should probably talk to her.”

I felt ridiculous for not having seen it earlier. I felt like an idiot for a thousand other reasons: the way my chest had warmed near her, the stupid catalog of things I had admired without owning the word for what they were.

I walked back to my desk like a man carrying an offence. 

Tara was there, idly stapling papers, the light catching in her hair. She looked up and smiled the smile that had been a small electric current under everything we’d done together. For a breath, I considered shutting my mouth and letting the day fold into itself. Instead I sat down and asked for coffee, like the simplest ritual could be a preface to conversation.

“Varun?” she said, careful.

“I asked Neeraj to trace again,” I said. “Because I needed—” I stopped. The truth tasted like surrender.

She set down her pen. “You wanted proof.”

“Yes.”

She exhaled. The café around us continued with its metallic clatter. She glanced at my phone, then at the log sheets spread across the table, then back at me.

“I started it as a joke,” she said finally, the words small and deliberate. “A stupid, childish thing. I sent the first mail to see how you’d react. You laughed, and then you came to me, and you looked relieved. You cared that someone noticed.” She colored slightly, the way people do when something intimate becomes public. “It turned into something else.”

“My God,” I said, because the breath left me like a drawer pulled open.

She smiled in a way that was equal parts apology and absurdity. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she insisted. “I didn’t want to be the stalker. I wanted to be the person you talked to about being stalked. I wanted—” She stopped, searched for a smaller, truer sentence. “At times, when you don’t see my feelings, I make you see them.”

It came out as a confession and a joke somehow—her trying to wear truth like clothing that fit. The line landed between us and made both of us laugh, sound cracking on the edges like a pane of glass warming. The laugh broke the tension into human pieces.

“You—” I began, couldn’t finish. The staircase of thought was suddenly crowded with ladders: betrayal, relief, tenderness. I could see the edges of her motive, and it was awful and honest and, in that small instant, heartbreakingly ordinary.

“You could have told me,” I said.

She shrugged, a tiny, comic gesture. “You could have noticed me.”

We both grinned, which made the moment less like a verdict and more like a knotted shoelace you have to undo slowly. Nothing irreversible had happened. No crime had been committed. There were lessons unpacked and apologies given and Neeraj’s quiet, embarrassed suggestions about better access control policies. There was bureaucracy. There were memos.

We walked out into the wet evening together, the city smelling of rain and fried food. Her hand brushed mine and stayed there, light and improbable. I squeezed back, an almost-gallant pressure that contained more than coincidence.

“Maybe everything is fair in love and war,” she said after a while, as we paused under a streetlamp that made her hair a halo.

I laughed. “Bad wars, worse love,” I teased.

She bumped her shoulder into mine with exaggerated gravity. “At times, it is difficult to see things as they are,” she said, looking up at me like someone handing over a small, significant map.

I looked at her—really looked—and I saw the thing that had been hiding in plain sight: the rough, bright, human thing that wanted to be seen.

We stepped out into the night, the rain now only a memory on the pavements. The streetlights stretched themselves into long golden sighs, and the city seemed to forgive us for our foolishness. 

Tara walked beside me, quiet, her hand finding mine as if it had always known the way. For the first time, I wasn’t trying to read between her silences—I simply let them exist. The world, blurred and shimmering around us, felt suddenly honest. Maybe love doesn’t announce itself with grand gestures; maybe it hides inside small, clumsy mistakes. And maybe, as she’d said, at times it is difficult to see things as they are—until someone makes you look again.

***

Author's Note

Sometimes, the stories we tell aren’t about what happens around us, but about what happens within. “Maybe She Never Existed” is a reminder that love, fear, and the need to be seen often speak the same language — we just have to listen a little closer.

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