By the time I reached the gate, Margot was standing beside Darren with four suitcases and the confidence of someone who believed persistence would eventually become permission. Tomás showed me the screenshots. They looked convincing until I noticed the date. According to them, I had invited Margot two weeks earlier while I had been flying overnight with my phone in airplane mode. I opened our actual conversation. The messages simply did not exist.
Margot’s face changed when I asked her to unlock her phone and show me the original thread. Suddenly, she claimed she had deleted it by accident. Darren looked genuinely confused. He had apparently believed I invited them and had even paid for nonrefundable flights based on those screenshots. When he asked where she got them, Margot finally admitted she had created them using a fake-message generator because she thought I would “get over it” once they arrived.
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