The Voice He Wanted

I can't do this. The moment he typed *I want to hear your voice, not just read it* — I closed the laptop and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars.

Because Dante wasn't a photograph. Dante was six months of 2 a.m. conversation, of him sending me a song and saying *this one reminded me of you*, of me writing back *you don't even know what I look like* and him answering, *I know how you think. That's the part that matters.*

I'd built Luna the way I built everything else — carefully, from the good parts. Her photos were a girl I found on a stock site, some willowy thing with sun-streaked hair and a laugh caught mid-air. Her name was the moon. Her body was a lie.

I'd told myself it was a game. Winter break, one dead week in my flat while Sophia was away skiing with her family and the city went quiet and grey. I'd joined a dating app on a dare from nobody, purely to see if I could still make strangers laugh. Then Dante matched with me and asked what I was reading, and I told him the truth — a battered second-hand paperback of *Wuthering Heights* I'd read eleven times — and he wrote back, *You're the first person on here who's answered a question like it actually mattered.*

And it mattered. God help me, it mattered.

He told me about his work in fragments. He never said what he did; he said *I spend my days fixing other people's messes* and *I have a mother who thinks I'm lonely* and *I haven't slept properly since I was nineteen.* He didn't post his face. Just a dark, blurred shot — a shoulder, a jawline, the corner of a room with expensive-looking shadow. I didn't care. I'd never cared less about a face in my life.

He sent me a voice note once, by accident, and I played it forty times in one night. Low. Rough at the edges. Amused, even when he was saying something sad. *You make me feel human*, he said, and I sat in my dark bedroom with my phone against my chest like a hormonal teenager and thought: *this is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me.*

Because I knew how this ended. I have always known how this ends.

I'm the girl who sends the funny message first so nobody notices she's the biggest person in the room. I'm the one who makes the joke before the joke can be made about her. I've spent twenty-one years learning exactly how people's faces change when they see me in person after liking me online — the half-second flicker, the smile that arrives late and sits wrong. I've watched it happen. I've watched boys type *you're so funny* and then go quiet in a car park.

So when he asked to meet — *Saturday, that place by the canal, I'll wait as long as it takes* — I did what I always do.

I ran.

I wrote the message at 03:47, because that's when my courage is at its most honest. *I can't do this. I'm sorry. Please don't look for me.* Then I deleted the account, blocked his number, and sat on the bathroom floor of my flat with my back against the cold tiles, shaking so hard my teeth chattered.

The worst part wasn't the grief. It was the relief. That horrible, sick relief of a person who has jumped off the cliff on purpose, because at least now the falling is *hers.*

For three days I didn't eat properly. Sophia rang from the Alps, breathless and sun-drunk, telling me about a boy she'd met on the slopes, and I laughed in all the right places and said *God, I miss you,* and then hung up and cried into a cushion until my ribs ached.

I told myself it was mercy. He'd wanted a girl with sunlight in her hair. I'd have shown up with chestnut waves I can never quite tame, and a body that takes up space, and he'd have been kind about it — that's the thing, he'd have been *kind* — and kindness would have finished me.

*You don't owe anyone your face,* Sophia would have said. Except that's not true, is it? Not when you've spent six months letting someone love a photograph.

On the fourth day I found his profile again. I don't know why. Some sick need to twist the knife. I'd assumed he was nobody — a man with a nice voice and a sad job and a mother who worried about him. But the account had a business page linked, and the business page had a name, and the name was Duca.

I sat very still in my kitchen, the radiator ticking, and read it twice.

*Duca Holdings. London.*

And underneath, in a list of directors, printed in a font so small I had to hold the screen to my nose: **William Duca.**

I didn't know what that meant. Not really. Not then. I only knew the name because Sophia says it — *my brother's impossible, my brother's a nightmare, my brother hasn't laughed properly since Dad died.* I only knew it the way you know the name of a storm that hasn't reached your street yet.

I put the phone face-down on the table and stared at the wall.

Somewhere in London, at that exact moment, a man was sitting in a room I couldn't picture, listening to a voice note from a girl who didn't exist, trying to work out how a person could vanish so completely in one night.

And I had done that. Me. Not Luna — Luna was never real. *I* had done it. I had taken the one good thing I'd ever been given and smashed it myself, before anyone else could, because at least this way I got to choose the moment.

I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and replayed everything he'd ever said, and every single line came back to me in a different colour now, lit up with a name I'd heard a hundred times.

*I spend my days fixing other people's messes.*

*I haven't slept properly since I was nineteen.*

*You make me feel human.*

I pressed my face into the pillow and said it out loud, just once, into the dark where no one could hear it — the only place I ever tell the truth.

"I'm sorry, Dante."

He'd never hear it. He'd never know it was me. That was the point, wasn't it? That was the whole entire point.

So tell me honestly — was I right to block him? Was I *right* to spare us both the moment he looked up and saw me, and something in his face went quiet?

Or was I just a coward who broke a good man's heart because she couldn't bear to find out whether he'd have loved her anyway?