The Flame Wall

The confession has 2,847 burns.

I read it again, my thumb hovering over the screen like the number might change. It won't. I checked four minutes ago and it was 2,831. Sixteen new people in four minutes who read what I wrote at 3 AM after most of a bottle of Riesling and thought: yes, this. Burn.

The confession:

I've been in love with someone in my friend group for two years. I've never said it out loud. I've never even typed it anywhere but here. I'm terrified that if I do, I'll lose seven people instead of gaining one.

Anonymous. That's the entire point of Unveil. Matte black interface, confessions appearing as amber text cards, glowing for 48 hours before they dissolve. No profiles. No usernames. No trace.

Except.

I scroll up to the Flame Wall. Trending confessions. Mine is third. Behind a woman in Munich confessing she hates her newborn, and a man in Hamburg admitting he's been sleeping with his business partner's wife for six years. Good company.

The app tells me 2,847 strangers connected with my fear. It doesn't tell me anything useful, like how to stop being afraid.

I close Unveil and open my laptop. Two monitors glowing in the dark of my apartment. The plants on my desk throw long shadows against the wall, and the radiator is clicking that pattern it does in November, three short taps then silence, like a code I've never cracked.

My UX brain is already working. I spent four months freelancing on Unveil's prototype before it launched. Before Kaz scaled it past anything I'd designed. I know the architecture. The content moderation pipeline, the pattern-matching engine they built for flagging self-harm posts, the metadata structure.

The metadata structure.

I open a browser, navigate to the dev tools, and run a packet inspection on my own session. I shouldn't still have access to the API documentation, but Kaz never revoked my staging credentials. Startup security.

The data bleeds.

Not all of it. Not yet. But the pattern-matching system that was supposed to identify threatening content has a secondary function nobody talks about: it cross-references writing style, typing cadence, punctuation habits, and posting timestamps against public social media profiles.

I stare at the confidence score next to my own confession.

94%.

Ninety-four percent confident that the anonymous woman who posted about loving someone in her friend group is Romy Engel, 28, UX researcher, Berlin.

The room is too quiet. The tram passes outside, yellow light sliding across my ceiling, and I close the laptop and open it again because closing it doesn't make the number smaller.

I check the Flame Wall one more time. There's a new confession near the top. Posted twelve minutes ago. 647 burns and climbing.

I read something I wasn't supposed to. About someone I care about. And instead of telling them, I've been acting differently around them, and they don't know why. I'm a coward and a voyeur.

The writing style is familiar. Measured sentences. Declarative. The kind of person who revises before they hit post.

I screenshot it before it can fade.

My phone buzzes.

The group chat. Seven names. The people who've been my Berlin for three years. Friday dinners and 2 AM kebabs and lending each other money for rent and knowing which Spätis stay open past midnight.

Kaz: we need to talk.

I type a response. Delete it. Type another. Delete that too.

Two confessions on the Flame Wall. One is mine. The other one reads like someone I know.

I put my phone face-down on the desk.

The radiator clicks. Three taps. Silence.

I pick the phone back up.