I picked it up, and I opened the message.
The image loaded slowly. A hotel bathroom.
Brooke in the mirror, one hip cocked, lips parted in that practiced half-smile she used at every birthday photo. She was wearing Daniel’s old gray college sweatshirt. The one he told me he had lost on a work trip last fall.
I opened the message.
Under the photo, four words: “Can’t wait for Friday.”
The seconds stretched until the message simply blinked out of existence.
Then another text arrived: “Sorry, wrong chat.”
I read it twice. Three times.
Daniel breathed slowly and evenly beside me.
“Wrong chat,” I whispered to the ceiling.
Then I reached for the old iPad on my nightstand and photographed the screen of my phone before the timer could erase the image from memory too.
“Can’t wait for Friday.”
Brooke always used one of those third-party vanishing apps, the kind that ran on top of regular MMS, and trusted you not to cheat. No screenshot alerts. No notification flagging the sender.
I emailed the photo to myself from the iPad and saved it again to a folder I labeled “Recipes.”
Then I lay there and let eleven years rewind behind my eyes:
