A memory tore through me like glass dragged slow across skin.
I gasped before I realized I had.
My ribs ached. My head throbbed. But the memory screamed louder than the pain.
I was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.
Mama would sit on the edge of her bed in the late hours, long after she thought I was asleep. The lamplight would spill over her shoulders, her silhouette hunched forward, pen in hand. Page after page. Her writing never stopped.
I never asked what was inside. She never offered. And even though she didn't tell me not to look, I never dared.
I used to think it was about the cancer.
Her pain. Her past. Her slow goodbye.
I thought she just needed a place to put it all.
But I remember how she wrapped it—like something sacred. Wrapped it in fabric, like a wound she didn't want the world to see. Slipped it behind the loose panel in her wardrobe. Not hidden out of shame. Hidden with purpose.
Now I see it.
That journal… it wasn't just hers.
It was mine. A warning. A key.
A scream locked in pages I was too young to hear.
My hands trembled in my lap, sweat blooming down my back despite the cold. I tasted metal—fear, memory, or both.
And I couldn't say a word—not with Jason staring, not with the walls listening. So I said nothing.
Jason was still watching me. Like he could tell something had cracked open inside me—but not what.
All those years I passed it by, like a child too polite for her own good.
What if I'd opened it then?
Would we still be here?
But deep inside, I was burning with one truth.
I know where it is.
A low mechanical sound echoed from above.
We both looked up.
Something was being lowered through the vent—slow, deliberate. A rope. And tied at the end of it… a package.
Wrapped in brown paper. Still warm.
Dinner.
But all I could think of was the journal.
And the question that suddenly wouldn't let me
go:
What if everything we needed was inside it?