For the next few days, Louise waited, but there was no reply. For the second time since their first exchange of emails, Louise wondered if she had gone too far.

14th September 2001…

Louise jumped in surprise at the presence of a new email from Phil in her inbox.

“Dear Louise, I’m sorry it’s taken a few days to compose myself to tell you this. Most of my family were in the twin towers when they went down on the 11th. I lost them. I’ll always remember you and all you’ve done for me, but I can’t bear the thought of anyone else grieving over losing me, the way I’m grieving now. That’s what would happen if your story about your shrinking ring turned out to be true. I can’t even discuss the idea now. Goodbye,

Phil.”

“Don’t shut me out,” she typed, “Don’t leave me. Let me comfort you. Let me be there for you. It doesn’t have to be…”

She stopped typing in tears, and cancelled the email without sending. She felt the cold sting of truth in the emotions she’d poured into those two deleted and unsent lines, but couldn’t bring herself to send them. She thought back over everything, to the night he’d had indigestion. She wondered if she’d wanted it just that little bit less, if he’d loved her just a little bit less than she loved him. She knew that being eaten might not appeal (even to a giantess vore lover) as much as the idea of eating someone. Yet she couldn’t shake the thought that, if she had been the one with indigestion, neither that nor anything else would have stopped her from sending another reply that night. And she had hinted at wanting clues to his address twice before September 11th, and he’d not answered those parts of her emails.

How could she return to dating guys who didn’t care for her fantasy now? Nothing meant anything after Phil. She briefly went on one date with a much shorter and younger guy, so that she could fantasize about him being shrunken, but at one point late in the date, she asked him to look into her mouth, and opened it wide.

“No,” he had said abruptly, “I’m not a doctor.”

This was all the proof she had needed to know that the new guy would not have been interested in her fantasy, nor even tolerated it. He had pursued her keenly, but only for an ordinairy dull non-vore romance.

She’d faced tragedy herself in life before, but she’d never shut out the people who could have helped her get through it. Yet the whole situation seemed to rob her of any opportunity to appeal to Phil to look at it that way. She had been cheated in perhaps the worst way possible by whoever had planned the destruction of the Twin Towers, and that made her look at some unwatched videos she’d once been given by a friend in the underground media in a whole new light.