The morning the package arrived, the world felt unusually quiet — the kind of quiet that makes a person pause without knowing why. Erika stepped outside only to find a plain, unmarked box sitting at the edge of her doormat. No label. No return address. No hint of origin. Just weight — heavy in her hands and heavier in her chest, as though it carried something she wasn’t ready to hold.
It had been a month since Charlie’s fictional killing sent shockwaves across the internet. To most people, it was a story, a spectacle, a momentary obsession. But to Erika, it had carved out a hollow place where certainty used to be. She’d spent the past weeks pretending she was fine, telling herself it was all just theater… yet some part of her knew that every story, even a fictional one, hides a truth that cuts deeper.
When she brought the box inside, she almost couldn’t bring herself to open it. Something inside her whispered that whatever was waiting on the other side of that cardboard wall would change everything again — and she wasn’t sure she had the strength left for another breaking.
But she opened it anyway.
Inside lay a single object: Charlie Kirk’s last manuscript. The one he had been writing in secret. The one he had joked about, saying it would “explain everything someday.” She had laughed then, not knowing that someday would come like this — silent, unexpected, wrapped in brown paper and grief.
The leather binding was worn, warm in a way that made it feel alive. Erika placed her hand gently on the cover, tracing the subtle grooves left by hours of writing. She could almost picture him there — hunched over his desk, brow furrowed in thought, tapping his pen against the page the way he always did when searching for the right words.
But nothing could have prepared her for Page 1.
At the top, above the typed text, was a message written by hand. Not neat. Not polished. But raw — the kind of handwriting a person has when they’re not thinking about how it looks, only about what it means.
Her breath caught.
It wasn’t a dedication.
It wasn’t an author’s note.
It wasn’t meant for the world.
It was meant for her.
A final message.
A confession.
A goodbye wrapped in ink.
Something in her chest snapped the moment she read the first line. The weight of everything she had been holding back — the disbelief, the anger, the loneliness she’d tried so hard to ignore — came rushing to the surface. Her knees buckled. The manuscript slipped from her hand. Her cry tore through the room like something ancient, the kind of sound that belongs to a heart breaking for the second time.
Neighbors later said they heard the moment she fell. They didn’t know what had caused it. They didn’t know she was clutching a page that felt more like a wound than a letter. They didn’t know that love can echo long after the person who gave it is gone.
When she finally managed to lift the manuscript again, her fingers trembling, she turned back to the message. She read it. Then reread it. And somewhere between the lines, she felt him — his voice, his presence, the warmth he used to carry so effortlessly. The ache didn’t fade, but it softened, settling into something she could hold without falling apart.
Those who later saw the manuscript said the opening line was only the beginning. That Charlie had left something deeper — truths he never said aloud, stories he never told, parts of himself he shared only when he knew time was slipping from beneath him.
But for Erika, the meaning wasn’t in the secrets he left behind.
It was in the fact that he left them for her.
A love letter disguised as a manuscript.
A goodbye disguised as a story.
A final breath captured on the page so she wouldn’t lose him completely.
And sometimes, that’s the kind of message that changes a life forever.
Leave a Reply