FAZER LOGINAfter my funeral, Mom took early retirement on medical grounds.Her health simply could not handle the strain of grieving while trying to keep working.Every morning, the first thing she did was go into my room, dust everything, vacuum the floor, and make the bed.When she finished, she would stop in front of my picture and say the same thing she always did.“Kate, you can come home whenever you want. Your room will always be here waiting for you.”She never kept her phone on silent anymore. She turned the volume all the way up.The second it rang, no matter what she was doing, she would rush over and fumble to answer it.“Hello? Kate?”It was not me. It never could be.Eventually, everyone in the family listed Mom as their emergency contact. Everyone except Nellie.Mom and Dad went back and forth for ages, but neither of them could bring themselves to be Nellie’s emergency contact. Somehow, doing for Nellie what they had refused to do for me felt like another betrayal.In t
After three days in the hospital, Mom’s condition was still not completely stable.However, she refused to stay any longer. She said my funeral could not be put off.They had already failed me while I was alive. The least they could do at that moment was make sure I was properly laid to rest.They went home to sort through my belongings. Halfway through, my best friend, Esther Kelly, showed up.My eyes stung with tears.I would never make it to her wedding at the end of the year.Esther’s voice was cold and hard. “Mr. and Mrs. Hamer, I’ll be handling Kate’s funeral arrangements.”Mom thought she had misheard her. “Excuse me?” “You have no right to call yourselves her family now.” Esther could no longer hold back. Her eyes blazed with fury. “If one of you hadn’t hung up on her and the other hadn’t ignored her location alert, she would still be alive! She was just twenty-six!“Now, you want to plan her funeral? After what you did, how can you even stand there and pretend yo
Mom did not move for a long time.It was not until she had dug her fingers so hard into the edge of the console table that they started bleeding that she finally seemed to come back to herself.“Officer Foley, not you too. This isn’t funny.”Officer Foley sighed, then asked Dad to come over and broke the news to him as well.Dad looked completely stunned. He just kept shaking his head and saying, “No. That’s impossible.”Officer Foley sighed again. “Come with us. We’ll take you to Westhaven. It’s about two hours from here.”Mom did not say a word the entire ride in the police car.Her eyes stayed wide open, staring blankly ahead.Dad quietly asked the officers a few questions. With every answer, more color drained from his face, until eventually he stopped asking altogether.As if refusing to hear any more could somehow keep my death from being real.Nellie sat curled up in the corner, not daring to make a sound.The police car pulled up outside the county morgue. The mome
Her face went pale at first, then flushed red a few seconds later.“Is this some kind of prank?”Mom started shouting. “You’re one of Kate’s good-for-nothing friends, aren’t you? I’m not falling for this. She’s obviously trying to scare us because we didn’t answer her call!”“Ma’am, please calm…”Mom cut him off sharply.“Young man, you sound old enough to know better than to go along with something this childish. You tell Kate that if this is the game she wants to play, fine. She can consider herself dead to us.”Mom hung up. When the officer called again, she angrily switched off her phone.Nellie sneered contemptuously. “She barely got scratched up in that car accident, and missing her call didn’t exactly hurt her, did it? Why is she still making such a big deal out of it? Now, she is pretending she died?“Who even jokes about something like that? She gave me this whole lecture about how some things aren’t funny, and now look at her. This is a hundred times worse than anythi
After a full day at the adventure park, my parents washed up and went to bed as soon as they got home.Dad fell asleep almost immediately, but Mom kept tossing and turning.She had not gone on any of the intense rides that day, but even standing below and watching Dad and Nellie scream their way through them had left her dizzy and unsettled for quite a while.The longer she lay there, the worse she felt. Clutching her chest, she reached for her phone and called me.A silent laugh escaped me.Whenever they needed help, I was always the first person they thought of.But Mom, the daughter who would always drop everything and come running the second you needed her was not coming back.Four or five hours had passed between my fall and my death.If they had called for help as soon as they received my SOS alert, there was a very good chance I would have survived.My phone rang, but no one answered.Mom frowned and triggered an SOS alert to me.Still no response from me.She stared
I had originally arranged my vacation so I could take an extended break after Thanksgiving and take Mom, Dad, and Nellie on a trip to a neighboring state.After returning to work early, I canceled the flights and hotel reservations I had booked.The next morning, I saw a post from Nellie on social media.[Family trip!]In the photo, she was standing outside Dreamhaven Adventure Park with Mom and Dad, all three of them huddled together for the picture.They had not invited me, yet somehow they were still calling it a “family trip”.I muted Nellie and my parents on social media. Then, I pulled on my hiking boots and headed into the mountains to clear my head.I had only recently been assigned to work in that area, so I figured a hike would give me a chance to get familiar with the terrain.Since I was used to working outdoors, maybe I was too distracted by everything that had happened. I misjudged my footing and suddenly stumbled forward.I slammed hard into an old safety railin







