by Mae Doyle
Suddenly, the metal in my fingers felt hot and I dropped it, watching it fall back to my desk. It landed on an envelope that I hadn’t seen before in my hurry. My fingers shaking, I reached out and picked it up.
My name was scrawled across it in a handwriting that I didn’t recognize.
The flap wasn’t sealed, and inside was only a slip of paper and a picture. Tilting the envelope, I let the contents fall out into my hand.
The picture was Brett. It was a profile shot and he was getting out of a car. My breath caught in my throat as I looked at it. Even though it was an obviously candid picture, he still looked stunning. There was something undeniably attractive about him.
My fingers trembled. It was the first picture that I’d seen of him after his death. We didn’t have any of the two of us, and now we never would. Tears threatened to well up in the corners of my eyes, but I blinked them back.
When was it taken? I flipped it over to look for a date and gasped.
In the same handwriting as my name on the front of the envelope was the date. Yesterday’s date.
That made absolutely no sense. Someone must have been messing with me, just like they were when they told everyone that we had been hit in the side of the car.
Dropping the picture to my desk like it was burning me, I unfolded the slip of paper. It was incredibly thin, like tissue paper, and the writing on it almost tore through it. A familiar scent hit me in the face as I opened the note.
My god, it smelled just like Brett.
The smell was light, like it had almost completely worn off, but it was obviously his cologne. No matter how someone had gotten their hands on it, they’d managed to spritz a bit of it on the paper.
It was fucked up.
Already shaken from the photograph, I turned the paper over to read the writing.
I’m alive.
“What the hell?” I muttered to myself, turning the paper back over. There wasn’t anything on the back. I felt myself growing hot and panicked and I read the words again, this time tracing them with my finger.
I’d seen Brett’s handwriting enough to know that it was his.
But that didn’t make any sense.
We were told that he was dead.
We’d had a funeral.
Hell, even though I knew that he wasn’t dead, I was starting to wonder if I were wrong. If maybe he really had died in the accident.
They’d told me that I’d been in shock. That I could barely remember my own name.
If that was true, then it makes sense that I wouldn’t be able to remember whether or not he really was alive.
That I’d try to convince myself and everyone else that he was really alive.
They called it survivor’s guilt.
I knew all that.
But even more than what I knew to logically be true, I knew what I was holding in my hands.
Brett was alive. He had to be.
Thank you!
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