I stared at the screen, my fingers hovering over the keys. I remember the specific, physical sensation of the chair beneath me becoming suddenly insubstantial, as if the ground rules of the world had shifted while I was getting water.

It's me, I typed. *What do you mean she went away? Where did she go?

*he goes away sometimes. when it gets too loud. im the one who stays when she cant.

I didn't know what I was reading. I sat there in the blue light, fifteen years old, and tried to make the words on the screen fit into a framework I understood. Was this a joke? Was she testing me? Was someone else on her computer?

Are you okay? I typed, because it was the only question that felt safe.

A long pause. The "typing" indicator pulsed, stopped, pulsed again. Then:

no im not okay *theres a knife in the kitchen and its telling me to pick it up not me telling me. the other one. the loud one. she says its the only way to make it quiet

The words hit me like cold water. I read them three times, each reading making them more real and less comprehensible. A knife. Someone telling her to pick it up. Someone who wasn't her but was inside her.

Dont touch it, I typed, my hands shaking so badly the keys felt like they were moving. *Please. Stay at the computer. Talk to me. Dont go to the kitchen.

i dont want to. but she's very loud tonight. she's always loud when it gets dark. she says we're broken and broken things should be thrown away*

I was fifteen. I was in Östersund. She was in Greenwich. I was separated from her by a thousand miles of water and land and the useless, glacial infrastructure of the early internet. The chat window—that glowing rectangle that had been our sanctuary for months—had suddenly become a window into something I couldn't reach through.

I did the only thing I could think of. I picked up the phone—the family landline, the one mounted on the wall in the hallway—and dialled the international number for the British emergency services. I didn't know the number. I tried 911 first, the American one, because that was the one you heard in films. Nothing. Then I tried 112—the European standard—and it routed through. A Swedish operator answered, and I spoke so fast I tripped over my own language.

"I need the police—or an ambulance—in England. In London. Greenwich. There's a girl and she's talking about a knife and I think she's going to hurt herself. Please. I don't know what to do."