🔴 HE KEPT THE NOTEBOOK AFTER ALL — THE ONE I BURNED LAST SUMMER
I saw it sticking out of the glove compartment when he asked me to grab his insurance papers. The leather was charred around the edges, and I could smell burnt sandalwood; I thought I’d gotten rid of that awful smell forever.
“Why do you have that? I thought… I watched it turn to ash!” I remember screaming at him, how the smoke stung my eyes, the orange glow reflecting off his blank face as I lit the match. He promised me it was gone.
His face drained of color. “It’s… it’s nothing, okay? Just leave it.” Nothing? That notebook held every secret, every insecurity I’d ever shared with him during those long summer nights. I bared my soul in that thing.
Suddenly, the screen of his phone lit up; my stomach dropped when I saw Mom’s name flashing across the dashboard.
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The phone screen glowed, harsh and demanding. My mom. Now? *Why* now? My hand trembled as I reached for the notebook again, the burned edges rough against my fingertips.
“Just answer it,” I said, my voice tight. “Or are you afraid she’ll hear me screaming about your little keepsake?”
He hesitated, looking from the phone to the notebook, then back to me. His face was a mask of conflicted emotions – fear, guilt, something else I couldn’t quite read. Finally, he swiped to answer, putting it on speakerphone.
“Honey? Are you with Mark?” Mom’s voice was thin, shaky.
My blood ran cold. “Mom? Yeah, we’re together. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed. “Listen, I just got a call… from Mrs. Peterson. About… about what happened last summer. They’re asking questions again.”
Mrs. Peterson. The name hung in the air like a bad omen. Last summer. What happened last summer. The reason I’d sat by a bonfire, tears streaming down my face, watching my deepest fears and confessions turn to ash, promising myself I’d never think about *it* again. He had promised the same.
My gaze snapped back to Mark. His eyes were wide, fixed on the dashboard. He hadn’t just kept the notebook; he had kept a link to the very thing we swore to bury.
“What kind of questions?” I asked Mom, my voice barely a whisper.
“Just… details,” she said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “They said something about ‘new information’.”
New information. My eyes fell back to the notebook. The charred leather seemed to pulse with a malevolent energy. Could *this* be the new information? Had someone found out he hadn’t really destroyed it?
“Mark,” I said, ignoring Mom’s panicked questions on the speakerphone. My voice was dangerously low. “Tell me. *Now*. Why did you keep it?”
He swallowed hard, his gaze finally meeting mine. “I… I couldn’t let it go,” he stammered, his voice rough. “Not your words. Not *you*.”
“Don’t give me that romantic crap, Mark! You promised! We agreed we had to destroy *everything*. For my sake! For Mom’s sake!”
“I know, I know!” he said, leaning forward, urgency in his eyes. “But after… after everything… seeing you so broken… I just couldn’t completely erase the part of you you gave *me*. It was stupid, I know! I kept it hidden, I never looked at it, I swear!”
“You *never* looked at it?” My voice was laced with disbelief. Why keep it then? Just a morbid souvenir of a shared trauma?
“Okay, maybe once,” he admitted, running a hand through his hair. “Right after… just to remember why… why we did it. Why it had to stop.” He gestured vaguely towards the notebook. “It was a reminder, okay? A reminder of what we almost lost, of how scared we were. I didn’t keep it to hurt you. I kept it because… because I couldn’t bear to think of that part of our history just being… gone. It was *us* in there.”
His explanation sounded hollow, pathetic, yet… a sliver of doubt pierced through my anger. Was it possible? That he kept it out of some twisted sense of preservation, not malice? But the risk! The risk of *this* happening! Mom on the phone, terrified, Mrs. Peterson asking questions…
“So, what, you kept it as a monument to my trauma?” I scoffed, grabbing the notebook fully. “And now it’s somehow come back to haunt us?”
“I don’t know!” he insisted. “I haven’t touched it! It’s been in here since last summer!”
Mom’s voice cut through our argument, louder now, laced with panic. “Honey? Are you there? What’s going on? Mark? Are you helping her?”
The mention of him helping me, in this context, felt like a cruel joke. He was the one who had kept the evidence, the potential key that could unlock the past we’d desperately tried to bury. The truth, or at least *my* truth written in shaky handwriting, was sitting right here, burned but not gone.
Looking at Mark’s panicked, pleading face, I realized the depth of his foolishness, perhaps born more of sentimental weakness than intentional cruelty. He hadn’t kept it to use against me, but his misguided attempt to preserve a piece of our past had put our present, and potentially my mother’s future, in jeopardy. The secrets weren’t just mine; they involved Mrs. Peterson, the events of last summer, and the desperate measures we took to move on.
Taking a deep breath, I looked at the charred notebook, then back at Mark. “Mom,” I said into the speakerphone, my voice steadier now, cold. “We’re coming home. Mark and I… we have something we need to tell you. Everything.” I hung up before she could reply.
The car was silent except for the faint smell of burnt sandalwood. Mark stared at me, his eyes wide with understanding and dread. He knew. He knew that keeping the notebook hadn’t preserved our past; it had merely postponed the inevitable reckoning. There would be no more hiding, no more burying secrets. The fire hadn’t been enough. We had to face the ash now. And we would face it together, one last time.