“Technical problems,” she said softly, scrolling through the Lithuanian site. The laptop was there. Same model. Same warranty. But the price was in euros, and the delivery address field had a dropdown for Lithuanian cities only. Vilnius. Kaunas. Klaipėda. Šiauliai. Panevėžys.

She blinked. The URL had changed from .de to a local Lithuanian shop she’d never heard of: Pilko Varno Technika (Grey Crow Tech). Her heart did a strange little skip. It wasn’t anger at the redirect—it was something softer, like a forgotten key finally turning in a rusted lock.

She closed the laptop. But the redirects didn’t stop. Over the next hour, every site she visited—news, weather, even her online banking—briefly flashed a Lithuanian version before correcting itself. She saw headlines about a folk festival in Anykščiai. A recipe for šaltibarščiai (cold beetroot soup) on a cooking blog. A live webcam of the Cathedral Square in Vilnius, where a light rain was falling on the cobblestones.

Elena hadn’t spoken to Rūta since the week she left for London. A stupid fight about a borrowed dress. Pride. Silence. Twenty years.

“So,” Rūta said, wiping pink soup from her chin. “What was with the redirects? A glitch? A virus?”

She called. They talked for three hours. Lukas fell asleep on the sofa. The laptop sat on the coffee table, its screen now dark, the redirects gone, as if the internet had done its job and quietly slipped away.

“Rūta,” she wrote. “I know this is insane. But the internet just spent an hour redirecting me to Lithuania. Every single page. Even my bank. And then I saw that photo of us. I’m sorry. For everything. For the dress. For the twenty years. Are you still making šaltibarščiai that turns your whole kitchen pink?”