Katherine
Christian's room stared back at me as I opened the white wooden door, the hinge giving a soft, familiar creak. I think that used to be my favourite sound in this house—so small, so ordinary, so alive. Now, in the suffocating silence of these four walls, it felt unbearably loud, like something I had lost without noticing until it was gone.
His room was still neat. Still orderly. Still warm in a way that didn't belong to absence. Just like him. Just like my brother...was.
His scent lingered in the air, faint but impossible to ignore, wrapping itself around me like a soft, uninvited blanket. For a moment—just a moment—it convinced me this was not real. That I would wake up. That I would hear him moving somewhere down the hall, hear the life of him instead of this stillness that pressed against my ears until it hurt.
I took a shaky step inside.
The silence followed me.
It was in the walls, in the floorboards, in my chest. It filled the room, then the house, then my thoughts, until I couldn't tell where it stopped and I began. And I couldn't take it anymore—not properly, not in any way that made sense.
This house had never truly been silent. It had been alive with the noise of a life built slowly over my twenty-five years of life, held together first by four people, then two, then somehow still standing when it should have fallen apart completely.
After our parents died when I was twelve and Christian was nineteen, he stayed. Of course he stayed. I never blamed him for it. He was still a child himself, really, trying to study, trying to survive, trying to carry two orphaned lives on his back while pretending it was just another stage of growing up. I don't think I ever truly understood the weight of that choice when I was small enough to believe adults simply decided things and survived them. I could barely spell the word decisions, let alone recognise the kind that split a life in half.
I don't remember much of those first months after the accident. It is like remembering someone else's life—like watching myself from a distance, suspended somewhere above my own body, existing without really being inside it. And Christian—Chris—he was the only thing that kept me anchored to anything resembling real. He was the one who made sure I ate, who made sure I went back to school, who made sure I kept going when "going" felt like the most impossible thing in the world.
And now I was here.
Truly alone, for the first time.
The house felt it. The town felt it. The entire world felt emptied out, like it had quietly decided to leave me behind without warning.
A note sat on the fridge, still there as if time hadn't dared to touch it.
Put the washing on, I'll be home tomorrow.
That was the last thing I would ever read in his handwriting.
I wished, suddenly and violently, that I had kept every note he had ever left. Every stupid, ordinary scrap of him. He had continued our strange little tradition after our parents died—those small notes left on counters and fridges and beside mugs of cold tea, reminders and jokes and fragments of care that never needed to be said aloud to be understood. Mum and Dad had done the same once, turning love into paper and ink and leaving it behind like breadcrumbs through the days.
I had a few of theirs left. Not enough. Never enough.
The first tear came hot and sudden, sliding down my cheek before I could stop it—the first since the call from Christian's boss eight days ago, when he had used the word incident as if it belonged in the same world as coffee breaks and paperwork and not in the same breath as my brother's life ending.
An incident.
As if loss could ever be reduced to something so small.
I wiped it away sharply, almost angrily, as though I could erase the proof of it. But what good was crying, really? It would not return him. It would not undo the hollow ache spreading through my chest like something burning from the inside out.
My gaze drifted to the kitchen window. Outside, Burlington moved on with its quiet, indifferent rhythm, the soft hum of a town that had no idea it had just lost someone important again.
I had always lived here. Always known these streets, these people, these versions of myself that belonged only to this place.
And now they would look at me differently.
First I had been the girl who lost her parents. Now I would be the girl who had nothing left at all.
The unlucky one. The tragic one. The one people lowered their voices around without meaning to. The one they looked at too gently, too carefully, as if she might break if spoken to too directly.
They would tell me I was strong. That I would survive this too. That my family was watching from somewhere above, as if distance could soften death into comfort.
But I couldn't live inside that story. Not anymore. I couldn't exist as someone people mourned in advance every time they saw her face.
I had to leave.
I needed somewhere no one knew my name. Somewhere I could pass through like a shadow instead of a history. Somewhere I wouldn't be recognised as a collection of tragedies before I even opened my mouth.
My laptop was already open before I fully decided to move. My hands shook as I searched, as though the answer had been waiting there all along, just beyond reach.
Highway 90. Cities spilling out like escape routes.
New York—too large, too sharp, too full of everything I wasn't.
Cleveland. Toledo.
Chicago.
Something in me paused there.
It felt... distant enough. Big enough. A place where I could dissolve without being watched. Close enough to reach quickly. Real enough to be possible.
So I chose it.
I applied for apartments. For jobs. For anything that might build a new life out of the wreckage of this one. I had never been outside Burlington, Vermont. The thought of that now felt both absurd and painfully fitting, as though my entire existence had quietly agreed to stay small until it was forced not to.
Was it rational? Probably not.
But grief rarely asked for permission before making decisions.
People always said it did that. Made you do things you wouldn't normally understand until much later - if ever.
I wasn't ready to leave immediately, which made everything feel worse somehow, like the world had already decided I was supposed to be gone and I was simply taking too long to comply.
My fingers dialled without hesitation. Starling Property Partners. Miss Keyton.
My voice sounded steadier than I felt as I told her I wanted the house on the market as soon as possible. No delays. No waiting. No returning.
I could not stay here another second longer.
***
I pulled down a couple of suitcases and began packing in a silence that felt almost respectful, as though even the house was watching me leave. Everything that could fit went in. Everything that couldn't would be left behind for someone else to sort through, to reduce, to erase.
With a deep breath that caught halfway in my throat, I returned to Christian's room one last time.
I didn't know what I was looking for. I only knew I wasn't ready not to look.
I lowered myself onto the floor, the impact of the carpet against my body strangely final, like something clicking into place that I could no longer undo. My head tipped back against the bedframe as I stared up at the ceiling, as though it might offer something resembling an answer.
"Come on, Kat... just deal with it," I whispered into the silence.
But even that didn't sound like me anymore.
That's when I saw it.
A small metal box, tucked beneath the bed, hidden near the post as if it had been placed there carefully, deliberately, not forgotten but preserved.
My hands moved before thought caught up.
It was heavier than it should have been.
Colder.
Real.
I opened it.
Letters.
So many letters.
My breath hitched sharply when I recognised the handwriting on the first envelope.
Mum.
The world narrowed instantly. The room tilted - not physically, but somewhere inside me, something shifted out of place. My fingers trembled as I pulled it free, the paper shaking as though it had its own pulse.
And then I read.
My darling Katherine...
Everything in me stopped.
I hope you're not leaving your breakfast untouched again. Your father says you are getting worse at pretending you have eaten when you clearly have not.
Work has been... demanding lately. There are meetings that run too long and conversations that end too early. I cannot explain it in a way that would make sense to you yet.
Christian is growing quieter. That worries me more than anything else.
But you do not need to carry what we carry. That is the one promise I can still make without hesitation.
Love always, Mum
The words blurred almost immediately. I blinked hard, but it didn't help. The ink still swam, still trembled, still reached for me from a place I couldn't stand safely inside.
A sound broke out of me then - small, broken, wrong - like my body had forgotten how to hold itself together.
I clutched the letter tighter, crumpling the edges without meaning to, as if holding on harder might keep it from slipping away, as if that could stop what it meant.
But it didn't.
Nothing did.
And then it came - properly, finally, all at once.
Not just tears, but collapse.
Hot, relentless grief spilling down my face as I bent forward on the floor of his room, clutching paper written by a woman I had already lost, held safe by a brother I had just buried.
Christian had kept them.
He had kept her words for me.
All this time.
And in that moment, I understood - too late, too painfully - that I was not holding letters.
I was holding everything they had tried to leave behind for me to survive.