#2 THE LAST MESSAGE?

PART 1— The Replies She never deleted his number. She had deleted pictures. Folded away his clothes. Stopped taking the route that passed the café where they'd spent too many Saturday mornings pretending they liked bitter coffee. But his number stayed. It was the last place he still existed in the present tense. Every few days, she texted. Not conversations. Not letters. Just fragments. The debris of a life that kept moving without him. Sometimes it was something ridiculous. "I saw lilies today. The white ones you said looked guilty." She could still hear him laughing after saying it. "Flowers can feel emotions too," he'd insisted, pointing at a bouquet outside the florist's. She'd laughed so hard she'd nearly dropped her groceries. Now she couldn't walk past lilies without hearing the joke echo inside her head. Sometimes it was practical. "Your mum called. She asked if I was eating. I lied." His mother still called every Sunday afternoon. Neither of them acknowledged why. She asked about work. About the weather. About whether she'd remembered to buy groceries. Neither of them ever said his name. Sometimes the messages were victories she no longer knew what to do with. "I got the promotion." She stared at the screen for almost a minute before adding another sentence. "I cried in the car because you weren't there to be annoying about it." He would've celebrated like she'd won an Oscar. He would've insisted on expensive ice cream they couldn't afford. He would've told the cashier, completely unprovoked, "My girlfriend just got promoted." She could already hear herself telling him to shut up. Instead, she sat alone in the driver's seat, forehead against the steering wheel, while strangers walked past her car without looking twice. Every message ended the same way. One grey tick. Delivered. Never read. It should have hurt. Instead, it became routine. Like placing fresh flowers on a grave. Not because you expected an answer. Because love needed somewhere to go. Until the sixth month. 2:17 a.m. Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. The sound sliced clean through the silence. She frowned. Nobody texted her at that hour. The room was dark except for the pale rectangle of light spilling from the screen onto the ceiling. She reached for it with sleepy fingers. Then froze. His name. For one impossible second, her mind refused to understand what her eyes were seeing. She hadn't dreamed about him in weeks. Maybe she was dreaming now. She opened the message. Two words. "Wrong number." She stared. Read it again. Then again.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/file_00000000ec9c81f48bcd2de586de3faa.png"/> Her pulse began climbing so fast she could hear it in her ears. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "Nice joke," she typed. She pressed send before she could think better of it. Because anger was easier than admitting she'd just forgotten how to breathe. Nothing came back. Not that night. Not the next morning. Not the day after that. By the third day, she'd convinced herself exhaustion had played some cruel trick on her. Maybe she'd imagined it. Maybe grief could hallucinate. Maybe phones glitched. She almost believed herself. Then her phone buzzed again. "I think you have the wrong number." Her stomach tightened. She read the message once. Twice. Five times. Something wasn't right. The punctuation was wrong. He never used periods. The timing was wrong. He hated staying awake past midnight. But the number... The number was his. She didn't sleep that night. She walked barefoot through the apartment until sunrise, phone clutched so tightly her fingers ached. She searched his name online. Then his full name. Then his full name followed by "scam." Nothing. At one point she pressed the call button. The phone rang once— She ended it. She wasn't sure which terrified her more. That nobody would answer. Or that someone would. By five in the morning, the sky outside her window had started turning blue. Her hands shook as she typed. "Who are you?" She set the phone face down on the bed beside her. The silence that followed felt different. Heavier. Waiting. And for the first time since the funeral... She was afraid of what might answer back. The end.... ....of part 1.😂 There'd definitely be a continuation.

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