The landline rang. Not our main line, the one everyone uses, but the dusty, old rotary phone in the den. A relic from another time, kept more for sentiment than function. It barely ever chirped. So when it did, a slow, insistent BRRRR-ING, I knew something was off. My heart gave a strange thump.
I padded down the hall, expecting a wrong number, or perhaps a prank call. But when I reached the door, I didn’t hear a ring. I heard a whisper. My daughter’s whisper. Soft. Trembling. Full of a longing that clawed at my chest. I froze. She was holding the receiver, her back to me, hunched over as if protecting a fragile secret.
Then I heard it again. Clear as day. “I miss you, Dad.”
My blood ran cold. The phone slipped from my fingers, clattering against the old wooden floor. A metallic clang that sounded like a gunshot in the sudden silence. She whirled around, eyes wide, guilty. But I barely saw her. All I could hear was that whisper. All I could feel was the impossible, crushing weight of those words. I buried her father 18 years ago.
A happy woman with a postcard | Source: Midjourney
He was gone. A sudden, cruel accident. A car crash that left me a widow and her, a newborn, fatherless. I’d spent nearly two decades building a life for us, trying to fill the void, to be both parents, to protect her from the sharp edges of that devastating truth. And now… this.
“Who was that?” I asked, my voice a strangled croak I barely recognized.
She shook her head, clutching the receiver to her chest like a shield. “No one. Just… nothing.” Her eyes darted away. A child’s lie, transparent and heartbreaking.
But it wasn’t nothing. It couldn’t be nothing. My mind reeled, grasping for rational explanations. Was it a game? An imaginary friend? Had she found old photos of him, and this was her way of processing grief I hadn’t known she carried? She was twelve. Too old for imaginary friends, too young to conjure such raw, adult pain.
The next week was a blur of hyper-vigilance. Every sound, every shadow, every fleeting expression on her face. I found myself listening, hovering, my anxiety a buzzing static in my ears. I checked the phone’s call history – nothing. The landline was an ancient thing, no digital log.
Then it happened again. Tuesday evening. I was in the kitchen, washing dishes, when I heard the low murmur from the den. This time, I didn’t announce myself. I crept to the doorway, my breath catching in my throat. She was there, just as before. Hunched, secretive.
“Are you really… okay?” she murmured, her voice laced with worry. A pause. She nodded. “Good. I told her you were fine. She worries.” Another pause. A quick, watery laugh. “Yes, she’s still as bossy as ever. You know Mom.”
My hands were shaking so violently I had to grab the doorframe to steady myself. She was talking about ME. About us. This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t an imaginary friend. She was having a conversation. A real, two-sided conversation with someone who knew details. Someone who knew about me. Someone who knew about him.
WHO WAS IT? My mind screamed. A cold, nauseating wave swept over me. Was someone messing with her? Playing a cruel trick? Or was I finally losing my grip on reality? The grief, the stress, the years of solo parenting – was I hallucinating? Projecting?
A smiling elderly woman | Source: Pexels
I remembered his funeral. The open casket. The endless rain. The crushing finality of the earth covering his coffin. I had held his hand just hours before the accident. I had seen him. Felt him. Buried him. He was gone. He had to be.
But then, another whisper from the den. Clearer, more direct this time. “She misses you too. I think she still loves you.”
The air left my lungs. My knees buckled. I stumbled forward, my presence suddenly revealed. She dropped the phone again, eyes wide with terror. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
“WHO IS IT? WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?” I yelled, the sound tearing from my throat, raw and desperate. My carefully constructed world was crumbling around me.
She scrambled to pick up the receiver, her face a mask of shame and fear. “No one! I swear, Mom, it’s just…”
“DON’T LIE TO ME!” I grabbed her shoulders, my grip too tight, but I couldn’t help it. The desperation was a physical ache. “You said ‘Dad.’ You said ‘he worries.’ You said ‘she misses you too.’ WHO. IS. IT?!”
Tears streamed down her face. Her small body trembled under my hands. She stared at me, her gaze filled with a mixture of fear and something else… something that looked like pity.
“He told me not to tell you,” she sobbed. “He said you’d be mad. He said it was for the best.”
“WHO?!” I screamed again.
She finally broke. She pulled away from me, ran to the bookshelf in the corner, and pulled out an old, dusty copy of his favorite adventure novel. The one he always read to her, even when she was in my belly. My heart seized. She pressed a hidden button on the spine, and a small compartment clicked open. Inside, nestled among old photographs, was a burner phone. An ancient flip phone, still charged, still working.
An elderly woman smiling in her sleep | Source: Midjourney
She picked it up, her hands shaking. “It’s him, Mom,” she whispered, tears choking her words. “He’s alive. He’s been calling me for three years now. He just wanted to know if you were okay. If I was okay.”
The world spun. He was alive. All these years. My beautiful, lost love. Alive. Relief, a dizzying, intoxicating wave, washed over me. Then, rage. Betrayal. HOW? WHY? How could he do this to us? To me? The years of grief, the struggle, the emptiness.
“Why?” I managed to choke out. “Why would he do this? Where has he been?”
She looked at me, her eyes red and swollen, but there was a strange, knowing sadness in their depths. A sadness that made my stomach churn.
“He told me he had to go away,” she said softly, her voice barely audible. “He said he had to disappear because… because of you, Mom.”
My breath hitched. “What are you talking about?”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then looked directly into my eyes. “He said he faked his death to protect us from your family. From what you did.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. The air rushed out of me. My knees gave out completely, and I collapsed onto the floor, staring at her, at the ancient burner phone, at the dusty rotary. My family. What I did. The unspoken, unspeakable truth I’d buried even deeper than I’d buried him. The secrets I thought I’d taken to my grave. The reason he’d had to disappear wasn’t some random accident. It was the consequence of my own desperate choices. My own lies. And he’d lived with the lie, while I’d lived with the grief, both of us imprisoned by a truth she just revealed.
He was alive, but he was gone because of me. And I, his grieving widow, was the real reason she’d been whispering “I miss you, Dad” into the phone, for a man who chose to live as a ghost because of the monster he believed I was.
