CHAPTER THREE
1479 Words
THE FIRST TRUTH
I did not sleep that night.
I lay on my back staring at the ceiling while the minutes dragged themselves forward like reluctant witnesses. The words replayed in my mind over and over.
You have ten messages. Ten chances. Don’t waste them.
Ten chances for what?
The room felt different now. Not haunted exactly just aware. Like something had shifted in the air, something watching to see what I would do next. I kept my phone on my chest, fingers loosely wrapped around it, afraid to miss even the faintest vibration.
By 3:17 a.m., exhaustion settled into my bones, but my mind refused to quiet. I kept thinking about what the message had said earlier:
You need to remember everything.
Not some things.
Everything.
And that was what terrified me.
Because remembering meant going back to the parts I had carefully buried. The small details. The ones that didn’t fit neatly into the narrative I had told myself to survive.
Daniel had died in a car accident.
That was the story.
That was the tragedy.
But what if there was more?
Morning arrived too quickly.
My body felt heavy, my eyes swollen and raw. I dragged myself out of bed and sat there for a long time, elbows on my knees, phone dangling from my hand.
No new messages.
Just silence.
And somehow that silence felt louder than the vibrations had.
I opened our old message thread.
Daniel’s name still sat at the top of my inbox. I had never deleted it. I couldn’t.
Scrolling upward felt like stepping back through time. Memes. Inside jokes. Late-night confessions. “I miss you” sent ten minutes after we’d just left each other.
Then I reached the last messages.
Him: We need to talk.
Me: Not now, Daniel. I’m tired.
Him: It’s important.
Me: Everything is important to you when you’re emotional.
There was a pause after that. A long one.
Then his final message before he drove away:
Please don’t shut me out again.
I swallowed hard.
I had shut him out.
But that wasn’t the part that gnawed at me.
I kept scrolling.
And that was when I saw something that made my stomach twist.
A missed call.
From him.
Ten minutes before the accident.
I stared at it.
I didn’t remember that.
Why didn’t I remember that?
My heart started pounding again, slow and heavy.
Had he called to apologize?
To explain?
To tell me something?
Or to ask for help?
I dropped the phone onto my bed as if it had burned me.
This was what the message meant.
Remember everything.
I had convinced myself I remembered that night clearly. The fight. The door slamming. The screech of tires later on. The phone call from the hospital.
But maybe I had edited it.
Maybe my mind had softened the edges to protect me.
I picked up the phone again, hands trembling, and pressed play on the voicemail icon.
I didn’t even know it was still there.
The audio crackled softly.
Then his voice filled the room.
“Amara… I know you’re not picking up. I just” He exhaled shakily. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier. I was just frustrated. You know that, right?”
I closed my eyes.
His voice sounded so alive.
“So listen… there’s something I didn’t tell you. About earlier this week. I think someone’s been following me. It’s probably nothing, I don’t want you to freak out. But I saw the same car again tonight outside your building. I just”
The recording cut off abruptly.
Static.
Silence.
My entire body went cold.
Following him?
A car?
I sat there, frozen, the world narrowing into a single point.
The accident had been ruled exactly that — an accident. The other driver had fled the scene. They never found him. It had been blamed on reckless driving, on wet roads, on bad timing.
But what if it wasn’t random?
My phone buzzed.
I flinched so hard it slipped from my fingers again.
New message.
Good. Now you’re starting to see.
My breath caught in my throat.
See what?
That Daniel had been scared?
That he had tried to tell me?
That I had ignored him?
Tears stung my eyes again, but this time they were mixed with something new.
Anger.
Why hadn’t the police told me about this? Had they even listened to the voicemail? Had I ever told them it existed?
I couldn’t remember.
Everything from those days had been a blur of hospital corridors, paperwork, condolences, and numbness.
Another vibration.
You only have nine left.
Nine.
My chest tightened.
So that counted as one.
Remembering the voicemail.
Understanding that the story I believed might not be the full story.
I stood abruptly and began pacing my room.
If someone had been following him… then the crash might not have been random.
And if it wasn’t random…
Then Daniel hadn’t just died.
He had been taken.
A wave of nausea rolled through me.
This changed everything.
It shifted my grief into something sharper, more dangerous.
I grabbed my jacket and headed out without thinking.
I needed air.
I needed space.
I needed answers.
The police station looked exactly the same as it had a year ago. Cold. Gray. Uninviting.
My hands trembled as I approached the front desk.
“I need to look at a closed accident report,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “From last year.”
The officer glanced at me with mild impatience. “Name?”
“Daniel Adeyemi.”
Saying it out loud made my chest ache.
He typed for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Case was closed. Hit-and-run. Driver unidentified.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “But was there any mention of… suspicious activity before the crash?”
He frowned. “Like what?”
“Like someone following him.”
The officer leaned back slightly. “There was no evidence of that.”
“But was it investigated?”
He hesitated.
And that hesitation was enough.
My pulse began racing.
“Look,” he said carefully, “we work with what we have. The scene showed impact from behind. Could’ve been road rage. Could’ve been a drunk driver who panicked.”
“Could’ve been intentional,” I whispered.
He didn’t respond.
And that silence said more than words could.
By the time I left the station, the sky had darkened into early evening.
My phone buzzed again.
You’re braver than you think.
My throat tightened.
“Who are you?” I whispered aloud, though I knew there would be no answer.
Was it really Daniel?
Was it someone manipulating me?
Or was it the truth itself pushing me forward?
Another message appeared almost immediately.
Stop looking at the past as a tragedy. Look at it as a clue.
A clue.
The accident.
The voicemail.
The car outside my building.
A memory stirred faintly in my mind.
That night after the fight I had glanced out of the window before going to bed.
There had been headlights across the street.
Parked.
Engine running.
I had assumed it was nothing.
Just another car.
But now…
My breathing grew shallow.
What if it had been the same car Daniel mentioned?
What if I had seen it too and ignored it?
I felt the world tilt slightly beneath my feet.
This wasn’t just about grief anymore.
This was about truth.
About what really happened.
And suddenly, the ten messages didn’t feel like a haunting.
They felt like a countdown.
Nine left.
Nine chances to uncover something buried.
I stood there on the sidewalk, wind whipping through my hair, heart pounding with something dangerously close to determination.
For a year, I had lived like a ghost drowning in guilt, replaying the argument, blaming myself for not stopping him from leaving.
But maybe the fight wasn’t the reason he died.
Maybe it was just the distraction.
My phone vibrated one last time that night.
The second message will come tomorrow. Be ready.
I stared at the words for a long time.
Tomorrow.
This wasn’t random.
It was structured.
Deliberate.
Controlled.
And whoever was behind it knew exactly how to pull me deeper.
I should have been terrified.
Maybe I was.
But beneath the fear, beneath the grief, something else was rising.
Resolve.
If someone had taken Daniel from me whether through recklessness or intention I would find out.
Even if it meant unraveling everything I thought I knew.
Even if it meant confronting truths that hurt worse than guilt.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket and began walking home, the night stretching ahead of me.
Nine messages left.
Nine pieces of truth waiting in the dark.
And for the first time since Daniel died, I wasn’t just surviving.
I was searching.
And that made all the difference.
- Writer
