“He’s still here,” I sobbed, sinking into the chair beside her bed. “My boy is still here.”
Maya wiped a tear from her cheek and smiled softly. “He told me all about you, Mrs. Vance. He told me how you sold everything to fight for him. He told me you were the bravest woman in the world.”
For the next three months, Maya became a light in my dark, empty world. I visited her every week as she recovered. I brought her home-cooked meals, helped her with her physical therapy, and listened to her talk about her dream of going to art school. In a strange, beautiful way, caring for Maya helped heal the gaping hole Caleb’s death had left in my soul.
She was vibrant, sweet, and deeply grateful. But as the months went on, a subtle, uneasy feeling began to take root in the back of my mind.
Something wasn’t adding up.
PART 3
It started with small details.
One afternoon while sitting in Maya’s room, I noticed an old, leather-bound sketchbook in her backpack. On the inside cover, written in faded black ink, was a name: Caleb Vance.
I froze. “Maya, why do you have Caleb’s high school sketchbook?”
Maya blinked, a sudden look of nervousness crossing her face before she quickly smiled. “Oh! Caleb gave it to me when we met in the hospital hallway. He said he wanted me to have his old drawings.”
I accepted her explanation, but a seed of doubt was planted. Caleb had been fiercely protective of his artwork; he had never let anyone touch his high school sketchbooks.
A week later, I was cleaning out Caleb’s room at home, preparing to donate some of his clothes, when I found his private daily journal hidden beneath his mattress.
I sat on his bed and began turning the pages, reading his entries from his final months in the hospital.
I scanned through the entries from two months before he died, looking for any mention of Maya.
Page after page, entry after entry… nothing.
He wrote about his pain. He wrote about his love for me. He wrote about his fear of dying. But there was not a single mention of a girl named Maya. Not a single word about meeting an eighteen-year-old artist in a wheelchair in the hallway.
My hands began to shake as I turned to the entry dated exactly two weeks before his death:
