Seven years. Seven long, agonizing years since the world tilted on its axis and everything I knew shattered into a million irreparable pieces. My best friend. My other half. She was gone. Forever. A senseless car accident, a drunk driver, a life extinguished far too soon. I thought I’d processed it, truly. I’d grieved, I’d cried until my eyes were raw, I’d clung to memories like a lifeline. I’d learned to live with the gaping hole she left in my life, a wound that never quite healed, just scarred over, a constant ache beneath the surface.Then, last Tuesday, my phone vibrated.
It was late, I was scrolling mindlessly, half-asleep. A notification popped up. A text message. My breath hitched. No. My blood ran cold, a glacial current shooting through my veins. It was her name. Her contact photo, the one we’d taken on that crazy beach trip, her laughing, hair wild in the wind. My thumb hovered, trembling, over the screen. This had to be a glitch. A wrong number. Someone using her old phone. But the caller ID. It was her number. Impossible.
I opened it.The message was simple. “Are you there?”My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. A choked gasp escaped me. This can’t be real. My fingers were numb as I typed, slowly, deliberately. “Who is this?”The reply came almost instantly. “It’s me.”
Senior man reading a letter at a funeral | Source: Midjourney
ALL CAPS. MY HEART POUNDED. I FELT THE SCREAM RISING IN MY THROAT. This was a sick, twisted joke. Someone was playing with my grief, desecrating her memory. Anger flared, hot and sudden, pushing back the terror. “This isn’t funny. Stop it. You have no idea what you’re doing.”
Then, a new message. “The locket. You still wear it, don’t you? The one we got in Paris, engraved with our initials. You swore you’d never take it off.”
The locket. The one hidden beneath my shirt, pressed against my skin, every single day since she died. No one knew about that engraving, not even my husband. Only her. And me. A fresh wave of icy dread washed over me, eclipsing the anger. Could it be? Am I finally losing my mind?
Over the next few days, the texts continued. They weren’t frequent, but each one was a precisely aimed dart, hitting a memory, a secret, a moment only the two of us shared. “Remember that night we snuck out of your parents’ house? The broken window?” “The promise we made, sitting by the lake, about forever?” Each text chipped away at my sanity, blurring the lines between reality and a waking nightmare. I’d show my husband, my voice trembling, my hands shaking. He’d hold me, stroke my hair, tell me it was a cruel prank, that I needed to block the number. But his eyes… He seemed genuinely concerned, but there was a flicker, a brief shadow I couldn’t quite place.
I couldn’t block it. I couldn’t. A desperate, foolish sliver of hope had taken root in the barren wasteland of my grief. What if? What if there was some impossible explanation? What if she truly was trying to reach me?
The messages grew more urgent. More cryptic. They weren’t just about shared memories anymore. They started hinting at something else. Something she needed to tell me. “I couldn’t tell you. Not then. I was too afraid.” “It was a mistake. A terrible mistake.” My mind raced. What mistake? What was she afraid of? My stomach clenched with a new kind of fear, not of a ghost, but of a truth.
Senior woman wearing a white dress at a funeral | Source: Midjourney
Then, the last text came. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a memory. It was an instruction. “Go to the old oak tree. The one we carved our names into. Under the loose root, where we buried our time capsule.”
My heart seized. The time capsule. We’d forgotten about it for years. She’d been gone for seven. I drove there in a daze, the familiar path feeling alien beneath my tires. The old oak stood, majestic and silent, a sentinel of our childhood. I found the loose root, my fingers frantic, tearing at the dirt. My nails broke, soil caked beneath them, but I didn’t care.
Beneath the root, nestled in the damp earth, was not a dusty old time capsule. It was a small, sealed plastic bag. Inside, an ancient flip phone. Her old flip phone. The one she’d had before she got a smartphone. The one I hadn’t seen in years, the one I’d assumed was long gone. My fingers fumbled, pressed the power button. It flickered to life, miraculously.
There, on the screen, was a single, unsent draft message. Dated the day she died.
It read: “I can’t do this anymore. I’m so sorry. I’m in love with him. Your husband. We’ve been together for months. He says he loves me too. I was going to tell you, but I couldn’t. I’m going to tell him it’s over, that I can’t live with this lie. I hope you can forgive me, eventually.”
My whole world imploded. Everything was a lie. My best friend. My husband. The car accident. Was it really an accident? My mind screamed. I dropped her phone, the world spinning around me. I felt sick. The betrayal was a physical blow, worse than any grief. She died confessing her love for my husband. My husband, who had comforted me, who had mourned with me for seven years, knowing this secret.
Then, my own phone vibrated in my pocket. A new text. From her number.
Young adults wearing white at a funeral | Source: Midjourney
“I couldn’t live with it either. I saw her message. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t tell you. Not until now. I’ve been sending you these texts, from her phone, the one I found tucked into the passenger seat when they pulled her from the wreckage. I couldn’t send it then. I couldn’t bear to tell you. But I can’t live with this secret anymore. She was going to leave me. And I couldn’t let her. Forgive me.”
It was from him. It was from my husband. He had kept her phone. He had seen the message. And he had been sending me texts from her number, leading me to a confession not just of her betrayal, but of his own guilt, his deep, dark secret. He wasn’t just having an affair with my best friend. He had found her, dying, after the crash. He had read her confession. And he had kept her phone, and his secret, for seven years.
I looked down at the old flip phone, then at my own, vibrating with his confession. My best friend didn’t text me. My husband did. And he had just confessed to… what? What did he mean, “I couldn’t let her”? The ground beneath me felt like quicksand. The grief, the betrayal, the unbearable weight of seven years of lies…
I stood beneath the old oak tree, the messages burning into my soul, and knew I would never be the same.
