The morning after the call, Lily woke to silence. It wasn't the comforting kind of quiet. the kind that wraps you up like a blanket. It was a hollow silence, heavy and unfamiliar, like the world had been emptied of all its color while she slept.
She uncurled herself from the cold hardwood floor slowly, every muscle stiff and aching. Her eyes burned, her throat was raw, and her head throbbed from the night of crying. The apartment around her looked the same as it always had, but she didn't recognize it anymore. It wasn't home. Not without them.
She sat there for a long time, staring at the phone still clutched in her hand, cracked screen blinking up at her. Messages had come in — friends, concerned neighbors, even Officer Daniels again. She couldn't bring herself to answer. Not yet.
Eventually, the brutal practicality of grief forced her into motion.
There was work to be done.
Funeral arrangements. Legal matters.
Packing up the house.
The house.
The thought of it made her stomach turn, but she knew she had to go. She had to face it.
Lily stood there, taking a deep breath that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
The scent hit her first.
Lavender and lemon cleaner.
Her mother's scent.
It was everywhere — in the worn fabric of the couch, the faded wood of the kitchen table, the curtains that fluttered slightly with the spring breeze coming through a cracked window.
For a moment, she just stood there, letting it wash over her. The smell, the creak of the floorboards, the way the sunlight fell across the living room rug in a familiar pattern — it was all so normal, so unchanged, that she almost called out:
"Mom? Dad?"
But the house stayed silent.
And the silence was unbearable.
She dropped her overnight bag by the door and walked into the kitchen, the floor cold against her bare feet. A list of groceries her mother had written sat beside it — "Milk, eggs, coffee, lilies for the garden."
Lilies for Lily.
It was something her mother had done every year — planting new flowers in her honor. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but she pushed them back.
She couldn't fall apart again, not yet.
In the veranda, she found a stack of empty boxes someone from the police department must have dropped off. Seeing them there, so stark and clinical, made her stomach turn again.
She hated how cold it all felt.
But she set to work anyway.
Because what else could she do?
The hours bled together.
She began sorting through room after room, making piles — keep, donate, trash.
Each object she touched was a memory.
Each object was a wound reopening.
In the den, she found her father's old baseball glove, worn smooth from years of use. She sat with it for a while, inhaling the faint smell of leather, letting herself remember the way he used to toss the ball to her after school, laughing when she missed and cheering louder than anyone when she caught it.
In the kitchen, she found her mother's favorite teacups — delicate with little roses painted along the rims. She wrapped them carefully in tissue paper, her fingers trembling. She could almost hear the clink of them being set on the table, the soft murmur of her parents' voices in the morning.
And in the attic, the dusty attic, she found boxes of old photographs.
Black-and-white snapshots from their wedding day.
Polaroids of birthdays and Christmas mornings.
Pictures of Lily in every stage of her life, surrounded by arms and smiles and love.
It broke her in ways she hadn't known she could break.
Grief wasn't just sadness.
It was fury, too, it was terror.
It was the desperate, screaming need to undo time.
She sat cross-legged in the middle of the attic floor, photographs spread around her like fallen leaves, and cried silently, her chest heaving.
How could the world expect her to just pack this up and walk away?
The sun dipped low, casting long shadows through the house. Lily wiped her face on her sleeve and forced herself to keep going. She moved into her old bedroom next, the one with the peeling purple walls and the creaky closet door she'd always been afraid of as a kid.
It looked almost exactly the same.
Posters still hung crookedly above the bed. Her high school trophies lined the shelves. In the nightstand drawer, she found her childhood journal, the cover frayed, the pages stuffed with bad poetry and dreams that felt foreign to her now.
She smiled sadly at a few entries before tucking it into the "keep" pile.
It wasn't until she reached the bottom drawer of the old dresser that she found it.
A small, faded envelope.
Yellowed with age.
Her name written across the front in her mother's handwriting — "Lily" — in gentle, swooping cursive.
Her hands trembled as she picked it up.
She slid a finger under the seal and pulled out a single folded sheet of paper.
The words were simple, almost rushed, but unmistakably her mother's.
"If life ever breaks you, start over somewhere new."
"You have more strength than you know."
"We love you always — no matter where we are."
Lily's breath caught in her throat.
The paper shook in her hands as she reread the words over and over, as if trying to carve them into her bones.
It felt like her mother had known.
Like she had written it for this exact moment, this unbearable, shattering day when Lily would need her most and she wouldn't be there.
Fresh tears blurred the ink on the page.
The letter wasn't long.
It wasn't filled with elaborate advice or grand gestures.
It was just love — quiet, steadfast love — reaching across the impossible distance between them.
Lily clutched the letter to her chest, her whole body wracked with fresh sobs.
She wasn't ready to start over.
She wasn't ready to say goodbye.
But maybe... maybe when she was, she would know where to begin.
Maybe the first step was just surviving this.
She slid down to the floor, the letter still in her hand, and stared around her childhood bedroom, filled with the ghosts of her past. Everything she had been. Everything they had built.
Could she really leave it behind?
Could she really find somewhere new — a new life, a new beginning — like her mother had urged?
The thought terrified her.
She unfolded the letter one more time, her eyes tracing the last words over and over until they burned into her soul:
"We love you always — no matter where we are."
The night grew darker around her, the shadows stretching longer, deeper.
The house creaked softly, settling into the silence.
And for the first time since the call, Lily felt something shift inside her.
Not healing — not yet.
But a beginning, a crack of light at the bottom of a long, dark well.
She pressed the letter to her lips, closed her eyes, and whispered into the quiet:
"I love you too."
She didn't know where she would go.
She didn't know how she would get through this.
But she would.
Somehow, she would.
Because her mother had believed she could.
And right now, that had to be enough.
As Lily curled up against the bed frame, the house around her heavy with memories, she made herself a silent promise:
She would pack the past, every fragile, aching piece of it and she would carry it with her.
Not as a burden, definitely not as a weight.
But as proof.
Proof that she had been loved.
Proof that she could love again, someday, somewhere new.
The last thing she saw before sleep pulled her under was the letter, resting on the floor beside her.
Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she knew: This was not the end, it was the beginning.
She just didn't know yet what it would look like.