Her friend Jess, sitting across the table, got a notification. Jess blinked at her phone, then at Dana. “Uh… did you mean to send this to me?”

And suddenly, the incident wasn’t a disaster. It was the most honest thing Dana had said in months. She grinned, thumbs hovering over the keyboard.

Then she put the phone down. Some things, she decided, were better said in person.

Dana wanted to dissolve into her oat milk latte. Instead, she typed into the group: “Okay, but can we pretend I’m a performance artist?”

Dana grabbed Jess’s phone. There it was—her whole unraveling, sent to the group chat titled “Sunday Scaries (minus Dana).”

Dana had two rules about texting: never drunk-text, and never text anything you wouldn’t want read aloud in a crowded room. She’d broken both in one clumsy thumb-slide.

The chat exploded. Laugh-cry emojis. Screenshots. A voice memo from someone named Chloe that was just thirty seconds of wheezing laughter.

Twenty-seven minutes later, Mark finally replied—to her original text. Just three words: “I do, yeah.”