Not one phone call.
Not one word.
By the time I left for college, I’d convinced myself he had found something better.
A better life.
A better future.
A better girl.
Except he hadn’t.
He had written.
Every week.
And I had hated him for silence that had never belonged to him.
A tear slipped down my cheek.
I wiped it away hard.
“Stop it.”
I wasn’t that girl anymore.
I wasn’t the girl who waited by the mailbox until her father yelled at her to stop embarrassing herself.
I wasn’t the girl who cried into her pillowbecause the boy she loved had forgotten her.
I wasn’t the girl who lost everything alone and never told a soul.
My breath hitched.
No.
Not that memory.
Not today.
I pulled into the gravel driveway and froze.
A package sat on the porch.
Brown paper.
No label I could see from the car.
No delivery truck.
No mail carrier walking away.
Just a box where there should not have been a box.
Every bit of sadness inside me vanished beneath a rush of pure, cold fear.
My foot stayed on the brake.
