The Message in the Margins

It had started with a simple email. A short one. Polite. Vague enough to feel personal, but formal enough to keep a boundary.

"I came across your paper on grief psychology and found your observations deeply resonant. I’d like to share something I’ve experienced. It may be of interest to you. Let me know if I can write back."

It was signed:

— A Friend Who Reads Between the Lines

Clara almost deleted it. She was used to the occasional stranger reaching out. Her essays had been republished in niche online journals and grief therapy forums after her brother’s passing. But something about the way this email was worded felt… off. Not threatening. Not flattering. Just odd.

She didn't reply.

Then came another one. This time, no introduction. Just a paragraph:

"Sometimes, people keep secrets so long they start to rot from the inside. You write about how silence is a language of grief. But what if silence is more dangerous than words? What if a silence killed someone?"

No signature. No subject line. Just sent from a strange, scrambled ProtonMail address.

Clara showed it to her husband, Ashwin, over dinner. He was slicing through a lamb chop when she passed him her phone.

He read it twice, shrugged. “Probably some trauma-dumping rando. You don’t owe anyone a reply, you know.”

“I know,” she said. But she saved the email.

She also started locking the door when she went to bed. Not because she was afraid, just... to be sure.

Clara worked as a trauma counselor at a small private practice in Penang. Her days were spent absorbing other people’s pain. so she had long since trained herself to compartmentalize, to not take emotional residue home. But this email, this creeping sense of being watched by someone who wasn’t watching to be saved, clung to her like the humidity in the evening air.

Two weeks later, the third message arrived.

This one wasn’t an email.

It was a package.

No sender listed. Just her name and office address, neatly typed.

Inside the envelope was a small leather-bound journal. Unlabeled. Unbranded. The kind you’d find in an airport gift shop.

She flipped to the first page. The handwriting was narrow and fast, slightly tilted right. As if written under pressure.

“If you're reading this, then maybe you’re the only one who can make sense of it. I’ve carried this for too long. I’m not looking for forgiveness. Just… understanding.”

Each entry was dated, with no names. Just initials. Locations. Snatches of memory, therapy notes, confessions half-erased and rewritten.

And then, halfway through the book:

“I watched a man die in a hospital corridor. Everyone thought it was an accident. He was gasping for help, and I just stood there. I wanted to call the nurse. I swear. But my hands wouldn’t move. And when he went still, something inside me went still too. I haven’t spoken of it since.”

Clara’s hands were cold now. She flipped back. Most initials were anonymized: “M.”, “J.”, “A.” But then she found one — only one — entry that had been messily scratched out, as if the writer panicked halfway through revealing it:

“I saw Dr. Clara Gan once. She was different. Said things that made me think differently about guilt. But I was too scared to tell her the truth. Even then. Even as I sat across from her and lied with every word.”

The pen had pressed so hard into the paper that it nearly tore through.

Clara didn’t remember this person. She’d seen hundreds of patients over the years, especially after her essays had gone viral. People came to her not just for her training but for her own lived loss. Some wanted closure. Some wanted proof that surviving was possible.

But someone had come to her, lied to her face, and then disappeared. only to reach out now with this cryptic, self-incriminating journal.

The twist? This wasn’t even addressed to her. Not explicitly.

What if this message, this journal, wasn’t meant for her at all?

What if it reached the wrong Clara?

Or worse... what if it hadn't?

Ashwin was less amused this time. “Okay, I think we should talk to someone. Police maybe. Or at least your clinic’s legal team.”

“And tell them what? Someone sent me a sad diary?”

He looked at her, forehead wrinkled. “It’s not just sad. It’s confessional.”

She didn’t reply. That night, she read the journal in one sitting, cover to cover, until the sun came up.

Weeks passed. No more emails. No more packages.

The silence was louder than anything.

Until one morning, Clara received a voicemail. Blocked number. A woman’s voice, breathless, clearly reading from a note:

“I sent you the journal, Clara. But I don’t think you were the Clara I meant. I panicked. If you're not her, please burn it. If you are... you know why I had to disappear.”

That was it.

Nothing else.

She replayed the voicemail four times before deleting it.

And then she did something strange.

She began writing back.

Not via email. Not by mail. But in the same journal. The one she'd received. She started filling in the margins, underlining certain passages, adding commentary like a researcher analyzing a text.

“Why did you choose me?”

“What made you freeze in that corridor?”

“Are you sorry because he died — or because someone might find out?”

She never expected a reply.

But one day, she opened the journal and found a sticky note between the pages.

“The man who died — his name was K. That’s all I can give you. Look him up. You’ll understand why I couldn’t save him.”

Clara stared at the handwriting.

It wasn’t the same as the journal entries.

It was hers.

Her own handwriting.

She checked again. Same loops on the "g". Same slant.

Had she written this in her sleep? Had Ashwin played a trick?

Or had the message reached the wrong Clara… and found its way to the right one?

She started searching through old case files, local obituaries, and hospital records. It was obsessive, borderline manic. She started skipping sessions. Ashwin noticed her phone habits changing. He tried to reach her, but she gave evasive answers.

Then, she found it.

A local news article from six years ago. “Man collapses in hospital waiting room. Delayed response blamed on short staffing.”

His name was Keith Rajan. Mid-40s. A small-time insurance auditor. No family around. No one to press charges. Declared a tragedy of timing and policy.

And in the blurry photo accompanying the article, Clara saw something else.

In the corner of the frame, behind the reception desk, caught mid-turn. A woman in a beige coat. Her back was to the camera. But her posture. Her hair.

It looked like her.

But Clara wasn’t working at that hospital back then. She was in Singapore. Wasn’t she?

She called her old university friend to confirm. They hadn't spoken in years.

“Of course you were in Singapore,” her friend said. “You even crashed on my couch a few nights, remember? You kept talking about wanting to work in trauma but feeling blocked.”

Clara thanked her. Hung up.

Then stared at the article again.

The woman in the photo still looked like her. Not just in body language. In essence.

She pulled out the journal. Re-read the passage about “K.” The handwriting. The crossed-out name. The fear.

Was she being gaslit?

Or was she… starting to split?

She went to sleep with the journal under her pillow. As if it might whisper to her in dreams.

And that night, she dreamed she was walking through a hospital corridor. The tiles were clean. The lights flickered.

She saw a man slumped in a plastic chair, gasping, alone.

And she stood there. Frozen. Watching.

Unable — or unwilling — to move.

She woke up screaming.

Three days later, the journal disappeared from her drawer.

She asked Ashwin.

He hadn’t touched it.

She tore the house apart. Nothing.

That evening, just before dusk, she opened her office mailbox at the clinic and found a thin brown envelope with no name.

Inside: a new journal.

First page blank.

Except for one line, in familiar handwriting:

“Now it’s your turn to write what you remember.”