An unanswered message can become a story when the platform supplies signals without explanations.

Read receipts, last-seen times and typing indicators give you fragments of information and nothing to interpret them with. The mind is uncomfortable with a gap, so it fills it, and the story it writes is rarely kind to you. None of those signals know whether somebody is busy, tired, or holding a phone they have not properly looked at.

When silence starts producing a narrative, name the plainest explanation alongside it and see whether it fits just as well. If it genuinely matters, one direct question costs less than three days of guessing.