A Mother's Evasive Answers

The photograph lay on the worn wooden floorboards, its edges curling slightly as if trying to escape the memory it held. The boy with the dark hair and the crooked smile, Noah, stared out with an unsettling familiarity, his hand intertwined with the protagonist’s. It was a ghost of a past, a tangible piece of a promise whispered seven years ago, a promise that had been meticulously, terrifyingly, erased. The final message from the unknown number still glowed on the phone screen: «Tomorrow, I'll tell you why you forgot me.» Tomorrow. The word felt heavy, laden with a dread that settled deep in the protagonist’s bones.

Sleep offered no respite. Dreams, fragmented and unsettling, flickered at the edges of consciousness. A lake, dark and still under a bruised sky. The echo of a child’s laughter, quickly swallowed by a chilling silence. A hand reaching, then recoiling. Noah’s face, a fleeting image, would swim into focus, only to dissolve like mist when the protagonist tried to grasp it. Each dream left a residue of unease, a growing certainty that the past was not merely forgotten, but actively buried.

The morning arrived not with the gentle dawn, but with the insistent chirping of the alarm clock, a jarring intrusion into the fragile peace. The protagonist dragged themselves out of bed, the weight of the previous night’s revelations pressing down. The photograph had been carefully placed back in the wooden box, which was now hidden in the deepest recesses of the closet, a secret guarded not just by walls, but by the protagonist’s own faltering resolve. The phone, however, remained clutched in a clammy hand, a portal to the impossible.