My husband, Nick, used to have a cute little ritual where every morning he would leave me a note on the kitchen counter before he left for work. At the time, I was in between jobs, so I regularly woke up after Nick had already left. His little notes always served to brighten my day by reminding me that he was thinking of me. The notes usually contained words of encouragement, funny little quotes, or a simple: “I love you.” I always looked forward to reading them.
Nick left me one of those notes on the day he died, too. It read, “I can’t wait to take you out tonight. I love you.” But he never made it home that night.
At the same time that Nick was heading home from work, a drunk teenager had decided to take his friend’s car for a joy ride down I-40 and lost control. The boy crashed head-on into Nick’s car, killing them both. I never even got to say goodbye. My precious last words from my husband were on a sticky note on the kitchen counter.
His funeral seemed to pass in a blur. Friends often stopped by for days afterwards with Tupperware full of homemade casseroles. They told me just how sorry they were that Nick was gone, but it didn’t matter how sorry they were. They couldn’t bring him back to me.
I stayed cooped up in our bedroom, wallowing in a deep depression for what felt like an eternity. Neighbors and friends continued to stop by to offer their condolences, but I no longer felt up to answering the door. My whole world had just been torn to pieces, and yet I was supposed to act like a chicken casserole was somehow going to make it all better? I felt a bit rude for ignoring my friends’ graceful gestures, but I had also stopped caring. I couldn’t care. After days of crying and 2:00 a.m. rage-fueled screaming fits, my body was no longer capable of emotion. I was just numb.
One morning, at around 4:30 am, I stumbled downstairs to make myself a pot of coffee after my now-familiar nightmares refused to let me sleep. As the coffee machine was heating up, I glanced over and saw Nick’s note still sitting there on the counter. I hadn’t touched it since the day he died. After all this time, I just couldn’t bring myself to move it. It was as if taking the note off the counter equated with me putting life with Nick behind me.
I read it over again, imagining his voice inside my head. I reached out and grabbed the pen that was sitting next to the note and under Nick’s final “I love you,” I wrote: “I love you too, and I wish with all my heart that I could be with you.” Somehow that made me feel better, as if in some way Nick would be able to hear my message from beyond the grave. I poured myself a cup of coffee hoping it would give me the energy I needed to leave the house and buy some groceries. I didn’t know how much longer I would be able to stomach chicken casserole, after all.
After I returned home from the grocery store with my hands full of bags, I took out a carton of eggs and placed them onto the countertop next to Nick’s note. I glanced at it as I always did when in the kitchen, only this time something made my heart stop. The words on the note had changed. In fact, it was a completely different note altogether. It read: “Thank you. Don’t worry, we’ll be together soon.”
The room started to spin and I had to clutch the kitchen countertop to keep myself from falling. I stood frozen, staring at the foreign piece of paper, unable to look away. How was this possible? When I took a closer look, I recognized my husband’s flowy cursive immediately. I took a deep, labored breath as I tried to decide how to deal with this development rationally. I knew this new note could not possibly be from my dead husband, but a small part of my mind still wondered: what if it was from Nick? What if he had somehow found a way to communicate with me from beyond the grave?
I spent the rest of the evening nervously glancing towards the kitchen counter from the living room couch, half expecting to see yet another new note appear out of thin air. Finally, I forced myself to go to bed. I told myself that maybe my lack of sleep had made me start hallucinating and that this whole nerve-wracking situation would be gone by morning. I pulled back the covers on my side of the large, empty bed and tried to get some sleep.
Later, at around 4:00 am, I decided to get up since I couldn’t sleep anymore. As I turned on the lights and reached for my slippers, a gasp escaped my lips. On Nick’s side of the bed, there was an undeniable imprint of a body on the otherwise undisturbed sheets. I couldn’t believe my own eyes, not until I had felt the covers with my own hands. I could even feel a bit of residual warmth. My entire body started to tremble. What could this mean? Remembering the mysterious note in the kitchen, I ran downstairs to see if it had been disturbed as well. When I entered the kitchen, I stopped in my tracks. There was a new note on the kitchen counter. Quickly, I rushed over to read what it said: “You always look so beautiful when you’re sleeping.” I couldn’t believe it.
From that point onward, I began to see more and more signs that my dead husband had somehow returned to me. At that point I really did believe it was Nick, I had to. He wrote me notes every day that contained things I had never told anyone else: my favorite song, my secret obsessions, the code to our alarm. He didn’t just write me notes either. Sometimes I would come downstairs and my coffee mug would be on the opposite end of the room from where I left it, or the TV would turn on by itself when I was at the other end of the house. Once, I even came home to find every single window in the house wide open. It was if my husband was trying to reach out to me more and more. I slowly started to accept that Nick was finally back in my life, that maybe I had another chance at being happy.
However, after a while I could tell that something seemed wrong with Nick. It was as if he was starting to get angry with me. One night, all of the plates in the kitchen flew out of the cabinets and shattered on the floor. The next night, I awoke in a panic to see a black figure right outside my doorway. It looked like it was hovering in midair. I slowly sat up in bed.
“Nick? Is that you?” I asked with a shaky voice. Suddenly, the door violently slammed shut and when I ran to open it again the figure was gone. I couldn’t understand it. I thought that Nick returning to me meant we would be happy together again. I tried writing to Nick on the notes he left me like I had before. I asked him what was wrong, but his only reply was: “Soon.” What did that mean? What exactly was Nick trying to tell me?
From then on, his aggressive behavior only got worse. When I would walk into rooms, things would be hurled off the shelves directly at me. The black figure continued to torment me in the middle of the night, refusing to let me sleep. In the mornings, I would awake to find scratches on both of my arms. I was completely terrified. What had I done to make Nick so angry? All I wanted was to live a life with him by my side, and I thought that I had gotten my wish. I never imagined that Nick would become so abusive. He was nothing like the Nick I once loved.
The final breaking point came when I was carrying laundry from our bedroom to the washer downstairs. As I was about halfway down the staircase, I felt a great force push me from behind and was sent crashing down the stairs. The next moment, I was lying in a crumpled heap of bedsheets at the bottom of the staircase with a twisted ankle and severely scraped hands and forearms. Sobs escaped my quivering lips and tears streamed down my face as I gasped for breath. Not knowing what else to do, I slowly dragged myself to the kitchen where Nick’s latest note was sitting on the counter. With a shaking hand I wrote, “Nick please stop this! All I want is to be together!”
I collapsed on the floor next to the counter and continued to sob for what felt like hours. My ankle was throbbing severely and my sleeves had been stained a deep shade of red, but I didn’t want to move. I was too scared. I felt terrorized and trapped inside of my own home. I didn’t know what to do. Slowly, I began to notice a sound coming from the counter top above me. It sounded almost like a pen scratching on a piece of paper.
Laboriously, I peeled myself off the kitchen floor and grasped onto the counter, using it to support my weight. As I peered over the counter top I saw that a new note had appeared. This new note had three words written on it, three words that made my whole body numb with horror:
“I’m not Nick.”
For Reedsy’s curated feed of writing prompts and the chance to enter our prompts-inspired Short Story Contest, head to reedsy.com/writing.


