My Mother Faked My Breakup To Hide A Murder — Then I Found The Evidence In Her Garden

Part 2

The heavy paper felt completely wrong in my hands.

I knew the exact slant of my own messy handwriting across the front.

I recognized the heavy pressure where the cheap pen had nearly torn the paper.

I even remembered the faded coffee stain right in the corner.

It was from the tiny kitchen table where I had sat at two in the morning eleven years ago.

I had spent hours trying desperately to make my stupid courage look like ink.

I had written out every single thing I never said out loud.

I wrote that I loved her.

I wrote that watching her date Tyler Davis felt exactly like swallowing broken glass.

I wrote that I had a brand new job offer in the city and exactly two hundred dollars saved up.

I told her I didn’t care if we had to sleep on a bare mattress on the floor as long as she was there with me.

I had folded it perfectly, sealed it tight, and slipped it directly into her mailbox the night before I left town forever.

Or at least I firmly thought I had.

My fingers tightened fiercely around the crinkled envelope.

I stared blindly down at my own faded name.

I opened the flap right there standing in the humid driveway.

The original letter was definitely still tucked safely inside.

But there was another stiff page folded neatly right behind it.

It wasn’t my paper.

The page was lined, clearly torn roughly from a cheap spiral notebook.

The handwriting belonged unmistakably to my mother.

My chest tightened as I read the first looping sentence.

“Brian, if you are reading this, then I failed to keep old mistakes completely buried.”

My mother had actually found my letter before Megan ever did.

She had physically walked over and taken it straight from the Miller family mailbox.

She wrote that she had done it because Megan wasn’t stable enough for me.

She claimed it was because Megan’s father was heavily drinking again.

She insisted I had a real, tangible chance at a good life if I left Ashford without Megan dragging me down.

Then came the harsh line that made my knees go completely weak on the concrete.

“Megan came to the house crying on Friday morning asking where you were, and I told her you left without even saying goodbye.”

I gripped the edge of my car door until my fingertips physically hurt.

For eleven long years, I had deeply hated Megan for choosing someone else over me.

For eleven long years, Megan had genuinely believed I had completely abandoned her.

My mother had built a massive, impenetrable wall between us with one stolen letter and one cruel sentence.

I flipped the lined page over to read the final frantic scrawl.

“I am not proud of what I did, but there are terrible things you don’t know about that family.”

The ink was smeared near the bottom.

“Things your father knew.”

My father had died in a tragic car accident when I was a teenager.

“Things I really should have told you.”

The note abruptly ended right there.

There was no further explanation.

There was no apology big enough to cover the stolen decade.

Just the weak, terrified scratch of a woman whose mind was now drifting away.

I looked back toward the Miller house, where the front door was firmly shut and the porch light was off.

A sudden text message vibrated sharply against my leg in my pocket.

It was from an unknown number.

“If you’re back in Ashford, don’t open anything your mother left you.”

Another message immediately followed.

“And stay far away from Megan Miller.”

My blood ran completely cold in my veins.

Someone was watching me.

But what had my mother buried to keep us apart?