The River Doesn’t Care Who’s Watching

The lady with long auburn ringlets lived on the top floor of an apartment that was not quite a tower but felt very much like one — especially once she learned not to look out of the window.

The last time she did, her engagement dropped in real time — numbers draining away like colour from her skin. Since then, she stayed inside, wrapped in rented silence and a blue silk dressing gown. Occasionally, she glanced down onto a street that seemed to offer little but rain-streaked reflections.

Her only portal to a vibrant, thrumming world was a cracked laptop screen. Not a mirror but a tapestry woven of pixels, where she watched people living interesting, happy lives: going about their business, meeting friends, dressing up, laughing into their phones, pulling on clothes that ranged from skimpy to wildly adventurous before disappearing into the neon pulse of nightclubs and bars.

At times, she caught the comings and goings with a detached, professional air. It all seemed like fun. Her mind, though, was aglow with lighting tricks and angles — waiting for pauses in laughter. She could tell when joy had been reshot, a ghost of the moment it was meant to be. A part of her longed to visit the sun-drenched cafés, to be carried by the river flowing in the distance, towards the city’s famous castle beyond it.

Valentine’s Day was approaching, and she longed to be rescued from her gloom.

•••

He appeared one Tuesday afternoon — an unexpected gift sent by an algorithm.

Her Sir Lancelot came complete with ten-day designer stubble and superbly toned muscles. He had built a perfectly curated Instagram feed and amassed numerous devoted followers. He arrived as a kind of Tinder god, promoting laughter and adventure with minimum effort and responsibility, talking endlessly of low-maintenance hookups. Framed in high definition, he rode an Easy Rider motorcycle in the shape of a unicorn across sleek digital rainbow landscapes — a chiselled hero made entirely of light on a blank canvas.

“Hey. It’s me,” he said. “How you doin’?” He was clearly attempting an English take on Joey from Friends, though with a little less panache.

Even though her neck was cricked from not having left the screen for hours, she managed a faint smile.

“Oh, hey.”

For a split second, her pupils grew large, but then a dot appeared in the bottom right of the screen and she was distracted by the promise of its bleep.

Within her narrow rectangle, she sold her virtual soul to calm mornings, silky sleep, and soothing, deep beauty. Brands sent briefs written in the language of aspiration. A relatable goddess, her comments were scrolled endlessly: I wish I was you. I want to be you. I’ll die if you stop posting.

“No, don’t do that,” she replied automatically. “Life’s for living,” while wondering why she herself had not visited the cafés or the river or the castle beyond it.

Instead, she filmed those things through other people’s lenses, watched them slowed down, colour-graded and softened. The castle rose for her as content — solid, dependable, historic — a place built of stones she had never actually touched.

She recognised the signs in him immediately: the careful casualness, the illusion of effortlessness. The algorithm adored him. She did too, at first — professionally. He fit her feed with positive comments. She knew he would test well.

“Can you hear me?” he asked again, the voice slightly out of sync with the lips that smiled so easily. Yet there was something about those lips.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I can hear you.”

“You don’t sound like someone who gets out much,” he said lightly.

She glanced anxiously at the long oval mirror in her office-bedroom, then at the window as if it might punish her. Rain slid down the glass in thin, nervous strips.

“I used to,” she said. “Before the spell. Before ‘Pale Chic’ became trendy.”

“Spell?” He laughed. “Careful, girl. There’s a fine line between Pale Chic and Deathly Ghost. Life’s for living. Maybe it’s time you broke it.”

She thought she caught something in his real-world voice. They spoke often after that. At first he told stories that seemed shaped for consumption: danger without consequence, spontaneity rehearsed into charm. Then something else slipped in — something more granular. Once, when she said, “Hang on, give me a minute —I’m thinking,” he replied, “Careful, there.”

For a moment she was almost offended. Then she laughed.

She continued listening, enchanted but wary. She was afraid to speak too honestly in case her numbers dipped. She found when she softened her voice, the comments bloomed. She learned when to speak and when to smile. She was a lady half sick of shadows — suffering from what the analytics called burnout.

The night before Valentine’s Day, he acted boldly. He sent her a picture.

Not the unicorn motorcycle or the rainbow landscapes, but something quieter: a horse standing in a narrow street below, rain-dark mane, reins looped patiently.

I’ll be waiting outside tomorrow, the message said. No filters. Just cold daylight.

Her first instinct was terror.

Her hand hovered over the trackpad, heart knocking hard against her chest. Valentine’s Online was one of the busiest days of the year — hearts vacillating between hopeful and broken. People needed the reassurance only she could give. Admittedly, many were turning to AI now for validation, but then so was she. There were no snarky comments there, only a polite, coded memory. These days, politeness felt increasingly precious.

She almost sank back into the rented silence, into the blue silk gown, into the glow that had fed her, hollowed her, paid her. The laptop hummed. The mirror seemed to tessellate into a wall of inverted emojis. After all, it had never asked her to leave.

But the picture would not resolve. The pixels refused to behave. The horse resisted becoming content.

She stood, lovely legs trembling, unused to purpose. The tower protested as she crossed its luxury vinyl tiles — the floor cold, the air stale — and when she opened the door the curse struck briefly and viciously: notifications stalled, numbers slipped, relevance loosened its grip.

Down the stairs, past the doorways of other sealed lives, she went, and stepped out into the rain.

He was there.

Not carved from light. Not chiselled. No designer stubble — just the honest shadow of a beard. His jacket was too thin for the weather, his shoulders ordinary, his smile uncertain. His eyes, she noticed, had a sparking warmth.

The horse shifted its weight and snorted softly, steam rising from its flanks. Then, with casual indifference to the aspirational goddess standing before it, the horse deposited a pile of poo onto the road.

There was no way to edit out the sound of a plop like that. It was the most honest thing she had seen in years. She tried to repress the belly laugh that surged up — the kind of unrefined, irrational laughter that ruined complexions and threatened to undo her composure.

For one terrible moment she was tempted to go back and redo her makeup. Gods were so much easier than real men. Filters were kinder than faces. The mirror would surely forgive her instantly.

Instead, the curse dissolved into the gutter along with the algorithm’s expectations.

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “Needs must, I suppose.” He held out a rose — slightly battered, rain-darkened, but not yet drooping.

“So pleased you came,” he said, wonder threaded through the words.

“I’ve never actually been on a horse,” she admitted.

“No problem.” He dismounted carefully. “I’ve only recently started taking lessons. Something I always wanted to do.”

She remained uncertain so instead of riding they walked. Used to the ways of humans, the horse followed at a respectful distance, hooves striking the pavement like a steady heartbeat. Meanwhile he talked about nothing important — his job, his sister, the way the algorithm had nearly paired him with a woman who owned six mad ferrets — while the city hummed round her.

Smells returned. Weight returned. Life suddenly felt lighter.

On the riverbank, volunteers were picking up rubbish.

“You came out to collect rubbish on Valentine’s Day?” she asked one.

“Somebody has to,” the woman replied, smiling.

At the river, she stopped. It smelt pungent, earthy.

There was nothing curated here. Right now, the river was not sun-drenched or dappled with elegant white swans. It was wide and raw and moving regardless of who watched it — brown water surging around its own thoughts, carrying branches, old leaves, light broken into shards. Beyond it, a castle a lot like Camelot loomed: solid, turreted, built from stones worn smooth by centuries of touch.

Her phone vibrated weakly in her pocket. A missed opportunity. A falling metric. Already, the cost of looking directly.

“This,” he said gently, “doesn’t fit on a screen very well.”

She laughed — a real laugh, unfiltered — and something inside her unlocked. The tower receded. Inside the apartment, the mirror did not crack. It simply went dark.

She did not know what would become of her audience, her contracts, the woman she had been paid to be. She only knew the river was real, and so was the man beside her, and the horse, and the rain.

Her almond eyes were hollowed from lack of sleep — but at least they were open.

And the river kept flowing, whether anyone watched it or not.