As I stood by my 15-year-old daughter’s grave, life seemed to come to a standstill. The funeral had just passed, and my husband’s words still echoed in my mind: “We need to throw away all her things. They’re just memories.” But something about those words didn’t sit right with me.
It wasn’t until I decided to clean her room, where I hadn’t set foot in almost a month, that I stumbled upon a strange note. It was written in my daughter’s handwriting: “Mom, look under the bed and you’ll understand everything.”
At first, I thought it was just a silly joke or a leftover from her teenage angst days. But as I knelt down to investigate, something caught my attention. Underneath the bed, I found an old bag filled with notebooks, trinkets, and my daughter’s phone – the very phone my husband had insisted was “lost.”
As I turned on the phone, my heart sank with a terrible premonition. The messages began scrolling in front of me, fragmenting into pieces of our daughter’s final days.
February 15, 10:17 PM: “I can’t take this anymore.”
10:18 PM: “What happened?”
10:19 PM: “Dad yelled at me again. He said if Mom finds out even a single word, he’ll make sure we both regret it…”
Each message carved itself into my mind like fire. The words blurred together as I read them over and over, images filling my head – her frightened eyes, how she had withdrawn more and more in the last months.
In that moment, I realized something terrible: my daughter did not leave on her own. She became the victim of the one I had believed to be the closest person in my life.