the habit of you.

2.

there should have been satisfaction in ignoring her.

rowan had imagined the moment often enough. in every version of the fantasy, violet eventually came back. not because rowan believed she was irresistible, but because violet always came back. that was the one constant in a situation built entirely on uncertainty. no matter how far she wandered, no matter how long the silence stretched, she always found her way back to the same doorstep.

the only variable was how long it took.

sometimes days.

sometimes weeks.

once, nearly a month.

but she always returned.

for a long time, rowan had believed those returns meant something. she had treated them as evidence, collecting them carefully, arranging them into a narrative she could live with. if violet kept coming back, surely that meant she cared. surely that meant whatever existed between them was real.

she knew better now.

or at least she was trying to.

the message sat unopened on her lock screen.

hey stranger.

two words.

sixteen characters.

and somehow they carried the weight of an entire year.

outside, snow drifted past the window in slow spirals. the afternoon light had begun fading, turning the sky into a muted wash of silver and blue. everything beyond the glass seemed distant and quiet.

rowan wished her thoughts were the same.

she stared at the notification until the screen dimmed.

then lit it up again.

then let it fade once more.

it felt ridiculous, the amount of power a simple text message could hold. if anyone else had sent it, she would've answered without hesitation or ignored it entirely. there would've been no internal debate. no sudden acceleration of her pulse. no feeling that something fragile had just shifted beneath her feet.

but violet had always possessed an extraordinary ability to make ordinary things feel consequential.

a text became a lifeline.

a phone call became a memory.

a silence became a catastrophe.

rowan hated her for that.

or at least she tried to.

the problem with resentment was that it required consistency. hatred demanded a level of certainty that rowan had never been able to maintain where violet was concerned. every time she convinced herself she was finally angry enough to let go, another memory surfaced and complicated things.

she remembered summer nights spent on facetime until sunrise.

remembered laughing so hard she couldn't breathe because violet had made some terrible joke.

remembered hearing her voice after a particularly awful day and feeling, for a brief moment, like the world was less heavy than it had been an hour before.

the memories arrived uninvited.

they always did.

and they were never kind enough to come with context.

they never reminded her of the disappearances.

the unanswered messages.

the uncertainty.

they offered only the highlights, edited and polished until the relationship resembled something worth mourning.

that was memory's cruelest trick.

it preserved warmth more faithfully than pain.

the phone buzzed again.

rowan's stomach dropped.

another message.

for several seconds, she simply stared.

then she unlocked the screen.

hey stranger.

beneath it sat a second text.

i saw something today that reminded me of you.

rowan laughed.

not because it was funny.

because it wasn't.

it was predictable.

painfully predictable.

violet always returned the same way. never with an apology. never with an explanation. she slipped back into conversations as though no time had passed, as though weeks of silence were merely a brief interruption rather than something rowan had spent nights trying to understand.

there was an arrogance to it.

or maybe just an assumption.

an assumption that the door would remain unlocked.

that rowan would still be there.

waiting.

the realization should have made her angry.

instead, it made her tired.

she thought about all the versions of herself that had existed throughout the year.

the girl who checked her phone every ten minutes.

the girl who reread old conversations.

the girl who convinced herself she was fine before crying in her car after hearing a song violet would've liked.

all those versions had been waiting for this moment.

and now that it had finally arrived, rowan wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with it.

the truth was embarrassingly simple.

she missed her.

not the uncertainty.

not the disappearing acts.

not the constant emotional whiplash.

just her.

there was a difference.

a dangerous one.

because missing someone was often enough to make you forget why you lost them in the first place.

the room had grown darker without her noticing. snow continued falling outside, covering the street in a layer of white that would be gone by morning. temporary beauty. beautiful precisely because it couldn't last.

for some reason, that thought reminded her of violet.

rowan unlocked her phone again.

her thumb hovered over the keyboard.

every reasonable part of her mind begged her not to answer.

she had spent months learning how to live without this person.

months rebuilding routines that didn't revolve around waiting.

months convincing herself she deserved consistency.

all of that could unravel with a single reply.

she knew it.

she understood the risk completely.

and yet understanding had never stopped her before.

slowly, before she could overthink it, she typed.

what reminded you of me?

the message delivered instantly.

the typing bubble appeared almost immediately.

as though violet had been waiting beside her phone all along.

and somehow, that hurt more than the silence ever had.

a/n: guys im locked in