Seven years. Seven long years since I felt her hand, heard her laugh, saw the spark in her eyes. Seven years since I buried the biggest piece of my heart. And then, last Tuesday, my phone buzzed. An unknown number.
Probably a wrong number, I thought, swiping it open without thinking. My breath hitched. The contact name wasn’t a name, but the number itself. And the first thing I saw was the profile picture. It was her. Her silly, smiling face, the one she’d used for everything. My hands started to tremble.
The message was simple. “Are you there?”
I froze. I stared at the screen, every nerve ending in my body screaming. My best friend. My soul sister. She was gone. She’d been gone for seven years. I saw her casket lowered into the ground. I spoke at her funeral. I visited her grave every month without fail. This was impossible.
It’s a cruel prank, I told myself, my heart hammering against my ribs. Someone got her old number. Someone is messing with me. But the picture… how could they have that exact picture? It wasn’t a public one. It was one I remembered her setting just before… before everything.
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. My fingers felt like lead. I just sat there, phone in hand, replaying every memory of her, of us. From scraped knees in kindergarten to whispered secrets about first crushes, she was always there. My anchor. My confidante. My other half.
Her death… it was sudden. She struggled, of course. We all knew that. Depression had its claws in her for years. But the way it happened, so unexpectedly, it shattered me. The official cause was an accident, a slip, a terrible misjudgment on a dark road. But deep down, a part of me always wondered. Always.
Two days later, another text. This one made my stomach clench. “I miss our old spot. The one by the creek, remember?”
My “old spot.” Our secret place. No one else knew about that. Not even her family. We’d carved our initials into an old oak tree there, sworn eternal friendship. A cold dread seeped into my bones. This wasn’t a prankster. This was… something else. Something terrifying.
I tried calling the number. It rang once, twice, then went straight to voicemail. A generic, automated message. No name, no personal greeting. Just a dead end. I tried again. And again. Nothing.
The texts kept coming. Never a reply if I dared to send one, which was rare. I’d try, “Who is this?” or “Stop this now!” But it was like screaming into a void. The next text would ignore my pleas, instead offering another poignant memory. “Remember that awful talent show? You sang off-key, but I still thought you were brilliant.” Or, “I need you now, just like you needed me that summer.” Each one was a punch to the gut, a twisted, spectral caress from the past.
I started to sleep with the phone clutched in my hand. Every buzz, every notification, sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated fear through me. Was it her? Was she… trying to tell me something? Was I losing my mind? The line between grief and madness blurred.
My friends noticed. My family worried. I was pale, jumpy, distracted. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” my mom said, concern etched on her face. If only she knew.
Then came the one that broke me. “You never understood, did you? What it was really like. Why I had to do it.“
My blood ran cold. Why I had to do it. This was no longer just about nostalgia. This was a direct reference to her death, to the unspoken truth I’d always buried. The “accident” felt further away than ever. It was always suicide, wasn’t it? And now, this ghost, this spectral messenger, was confirming it. And implying… that I had a part in it?
I dropped the phone. A high-pitched WHIMPER escaped my throat. My legs gave out. I crumpled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. The guilt I’d carried, a dull ache for so long, suddenly sharpened into a burning dagger. What did I miss? What didn’t I see? What did she mean?
Hours later, curled in a ball, eyes swollen shut, my phone buzzed again. I cautiously reached for it, my finger trembling as I unlocked the screen.
A new message. Longer this time. More specific.
“Go to the old oak tree. Dig at the base, where our initials are. She left something for you. You need to see it. You need to understand.”
My heart pounded so hard I thought it would burst. The old oak tree. Our secret spot. The one no one else knew about. This had to be it. The answer. The truth. No matter how much it hurt, I had to know. I had to finally understand.
I drove like a madwoman, the moonlight my only guide. The air was cold, damp. The familiar path to the creek felt haunted. When I reached the clearing, the gnarled oak stood sentinel, its branches reaching like skeletal fingers. I found our initials, barely visible now, obscured by moss and time.
My hands, raw and freezing, dug at the damp earth. Rocks, roots, mud. Panic and anticipation warred within me. After what felt like an eternity, my fingers brushed against something hard, unnatural. I pulled it free.
It was a small, rusted metal box. I fumbled with the clasp, my breath catching in my throat. It snapped open. Inside, nestled amongst dried leaves, was a small, faded leather-bound journal. Hers. Her distinct handwriting on the cover: My Truth.
My hands shook as I opened it. The pages were brittle, filled with her familiar script. I skimmed, then my eyes locked on a specific entry, dated just days before her death. My best friend’s words. Her pain. And then, the final, devastating paragraph, underlined multiple times:
“I can’t live with this. Not after what happened. Not after she broke my trust completely, shattering everything we had. I told her my deepest secret, the one thing I couldn’t bear for anyone else to know, and she… she used it. She told him. She ruined me. I told her I loved him, and she laughed. Told me I was pathetic. And then told him everything. She didn’t just break my heart; she took my life. There’s no coming back from this. She won. I lost. Goodbye.”
I closed the journal, my vision blurring, the words branded onto my soul. She ruined me. She broke my trust completely. She didn’t just break my heart; she took my life.
It wasn’t a ghost texting me. It wasn’t her reaching out from beyond the grave.
The “him” she referred to… the secret she entrusted me with… it was about my boyfriend at the time. The one I’d been secretly sleeping with behind her back for months, while she agonized over her unrequited love for him. I had told her to confess her feelings, knowing full well he was with me. And when she did, I had humiliated her, told her how pathetic she was, and then I’d told him everything. I had confessed our secret affair to him, making sure to paint her as the crazy, jealous one.
The texts weren’t from a dead friend. They were from someone who found her journal. Someone who read her final words. Someone who knew the devastating truth I’d buried so deep, and who decided, after seven years, it was time for me to finally face it.
And the “you” she couldn’t live with… the “she” who took her life… was me.
My best friend didn’t just die. I killed her.
