Throwaway account because there are people in my real life who would recognize this immediately.
I never thought I would become the kind of person who kept a secret this big.
For months, I told myself it wasn’t really a secret.
I was just… waiting for the right time to tell the truth.
Then last Friday, I received a message from an unknown number.
It contained only one sentence:
“You should have told them what really happened.”
I stared at it for almost ten minutes.
Because nobody was supposed to know.
Not my friends.
Not my family.
Nobody.
I deleted the message.
Five minutes later, another one arrived.
This time, it was a photograph.
It was a picture of me standing outside an old building I hadn’t visited in years.
The picture had clearly been taken recently.
That was impossible.
I hadn’t told anyone I was going there.
Then came the message:
“I remember.”
My stomach dropped.
There was only one person who could have written those words.
And that person wasn’t supposed to be able to contact me anymore.
I spent the rest of the night going through old messages, photographs, and emails, trying to convince myself there was an innocent explanation.
There wasn’t.
Then I found something I had completely forgotten about.
An old voice recording.
I pressed play.
At first, there was only silence.
Then I heard my own voice.
I was younger.
Scared.
And saying something I had spent years pretending never happened.
I stopped the recording before it finished.
I couldn’t listen anymore.
The next morning, I found an envelope underneath my apartment door.
No stamp.
No address.
Just my name written across the front.
Inside was a single photograph.
On the back, someone had written:
“You weren’t the only one who kept the secret.”
I haven’t received another message since.
But yesterday, something happened that has me genuinely frightened.
Someone knocked on my door.
When I looked through the peephole, nobody was there.
I opened the door anyway.
There was another envelope on the floor.
I haven’t opened it.
Because there’s one thing I noticed before I picked it up.
The handwriting is identical to mine.
And this time, underneath my name, there are four words:
“We need to talk.”
I don’t know who is leaving these messages.
I don’t know how they know what happened.
And honestly…
I’m starting to wonder if the person I’m afraid of isn’t the person who knows my secret.
Maybe it’s the person who knows why I kept it.