No matter how much I wash it off, it’s still there. The evidence of what happened is still clear as day.

The smoke still lingers in the corners of my room faint, ghostly ribbons curling upward like fingers that refuse to let go. The old tin box from my closet lies open beside me, its charred edges still warm. Inside, only ashes remain.

They were just letters.

Old, yellowed pages tied together with fraying red string. Letters Grandma told me to read when I was ready. I wasn’t ready then. Maybe I’m still not.

Each one was written in her soft, looping handwriting ink that bled love and fear in the same breath. The first few were harmless memories, lullabies of childhood, whispers of the past. But then came the truth.

Our family wasn’t just blessed with intuition. We were chosen.

Mediums, she said.

Keepers between the living and the dead.

I had tried to forget that part of myself after the cold case. After they called me insane on the evening news. After I saw that poor girl’s ghost standing in the alley, pointing to where her body had been buried ten years before.

They said it was luck.

I said nothing.

So I shoved the letters deep into the closet, buried under forgotten sweaters and school yearbooks. I pretended the voices were just echoes. Pretended Grandma’s whispers were only memories. Pretended I was normal.

But when I found them again tonight, the words crawled back into me like old wounds reopening. The paper trembled in my hands as I read:

“You cannot burn away what runs in your blood.”

And maybe that’s what broke me.

The match snapped to life with a hiss. One letter after another, I fed them to the fire. The ink melted into smoke. The truth turned to dust. The room filled with the scent of scorched paper and something else. Something alive.

As the last ember died, I heard it, the faint sobbing from behind me, soft as wind through cracked glass. Then a whisper, the same voice I’d heard years ago in that alley:

“Why did you leave me?”

I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t.

Now I stand at the sink, scrubbing my hands raw. The water runs black with soot, but it never feels clean enough. No matter how much I wash it off, it’s still there, the weight, the guilt, the proof of everything I tried to forget.