My heart pounded so violently I thought it might break my chest.

Every instinct told me to ignore it, to shut off my phone and pretend I hadn’t seen it.

For illustrative purpose only
But curiosity—and something deeper, something that felt strangely like hope—pushed me forward.I knelt, hands unsteady, and picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. Inside was something that stopped my breath — her phone. The familiar pink case, cracked and aged. Wrapped around it was a faded thread — the friendship bracelet we made at summer camp, the same one I thought was lost forever.

The phone shouldn’t have worked — not after disappearing in the crash, not after all this time. But the screen lit up. For a moment, I saw my own reflection, pale and shaken, before a single notification appeared. A message. From her. “I never left you. You just stopped listening.”

I collapsed into a chair, legs too weak to stand. My eyes filled with tears as memories surged — her laugh, her off-key singing, the final voicemail I deleted because it hurt too much to hear.