Maya sat on the sofa with her phone held up in front of her, scrolling through her contacts slowly. Name after name drifted past. She was looking for someone to call.
The flat was tidy and completely still. The curtains were half-drawn the way they'd been for months — she'd stopped opening them fully sometime last winter without registering the decision. The walls were bare in two places where photos used to be. She'd taken them down after Diane had mentioned, more than once, that it was a lot of people she didn't really know.
Most of the names in her contacts hadn't been touched in over a year. Some closer to two. She went through them and tried to remember how the silences had started — and for most of them, she couldn't. People drift, she'd told herself at the time.
But sitting in her half-lit flat, phone in hand, she understood now that it hadn't been drifting. It had been managed.
Diane had joined her department three years ago and the friendship had been immediate — warm, attentive, the kind of closeness that feels like relief when you find it. But slowly, small things had happened. The annual reunion with her college friends — Maya had missed it when Diane fell ill two days before. Of course she'd stayed. Of course.
Dinner at her sister's: Diane had been quiet all evening. In the car after: "Your family doesn't really like me. I could feel the way they looked at me."
"That's not true," Maya said.
"You didn't notice because you're used to them. But I did."
After that, seeing her family had felt complicated. After a series of other conversations — questions about Maya's work friends that felt less like interest and more like audit, a particular silence whenever a new name came up — seeing anyone had felt complicated. Maya had told herself each time that Diane was just anxious, just needed reassurance, would settle when things calmed down.
Things never quite calmed down.
What about you?
When did you first notice that someone in your life was gradually narrowing your world — making themselves the centre of it?
The debriefings had been the worst part, Maya could see now. After the rare occasions when she'd managed to see someone — a lunch she'd almost cancelled, a birthday she'd made herself attend — Diane would need the full account.
"What did she say? What did she mean by that? Did you tell her about what we've been dealing with? Did she ask about me?"
Maya had eventually found it easier not to mention the meetings at all. Then easier not to go.
There had been the messages, too — Diane relaying things Maya's friends had apparently said. That Maya seemed different lately. That people were worried. When Maya had quietly checked, the people in question hadn't said anything of the sort. She'd been left unsure of who to believe. That uncertainty, she understood now, had done exactly what it was supposed to.
She found Priya's name. They'd been close once — before all of this, in a different version of her life. She pressed call before she could think better of it.
Priya picked up on the second ring.
"Maya. Oh my god — I was literally just thinking about you last week."
Something in Maya's chest loosened without warning — a tightness she hadn't known was there until it wasn't. She didn't say anything about Diane. She just asked how Priya was doing. Priya asked how she was doing. They talked for forty minutes. The conversation found its own ground — easy, back and forth, both directions. It felt, surprisingly, like real friendship. She had forgotten what that felt like.
What about you?
When you realise someone has been slowly repositioning you away from other people — what do you need most in finding your way back?