Writers 
The Message I Was Never Supposed to Read
The night everything changed started like any other night.
I was lying on my bed, scrolling through my phone when my best friend, Amara, suddenly stopped replying to my messages.
“Are you there?” I typed.
No reply.
I called her twice, but she didn’t answer.
I wasn’t too worried. Amara sometimes disappeared when she was upset.
A few minutes later, my phone vibrated.
New message.
I smiled, thinking it was Amara.
But when I opened it, my smile disappeared.
The message wasn’t from her.
It was from an unknown number.
“You need to know what Amara has been hiding from you.”
I stared at the screen.
“What kind of nonsense is this?”
I almost deleted the message.
Then another message arrived.
“Check her phone. Look at the conversation with Daniel.”
Daniel.
My heart skipped.
Daniel was my older brother’s best friend—and someone Amara had always insisted she barely knew.
I immediately called Amara again.
This time, she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Amara, where are you?”
There was silence.
“I’m at home,” she finally answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why?”
I didn’t know what to say.
So I simply replied, “Nothing.”
After the call ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about the message.
Who had sent it?
And why did they know about Daniel?
The next morning, Amara came to my house.
She behaved normally.
She laughed.
She complained about school.
She even borrowed my favorite hoodie.
But something felt different.
When she went to the bathroom, her phone lit up on the table.
I wasn’t trying to look.
I swear I wasn’t.
But then I saw the name on the screen.
Daniel.
My heart started beating faster.
I reached for the phone.
Before I could unlock it, Amara walked back into the room.
She froze when she saw me holding it.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly.
She took the phone from my hand.
For the first time since I’d known her, Amara looked genuinely afraid.
That was when I knew the message was telling the truth.
Something was being hidden from me.
That evening, another message arrived.
This time, there was a picture attached.
I opened it.
And my entire world went silent.
It was a picture of Amara and Daniel together.
But that wasn’t the shocking part.
The picture had been taken inside my house.
And behind them, clearly visible in the background, was something I recognized immediately.
A photograph of my late mother.
I stared at the picture for several minutes.
Then my phone vibrated again.
One final message appeared:
“Now ask Amara why she knows what happened to your mother.”
The sudden chill in the room had nothing to do with the night air.
My body went completely rigid. The soft, metallic click of the front door unlocking echoed through the quiet house like a gunshot.
Amara’s eyes went wide with pure terror. She didn't say a word. She just grabbed my wrist, her fingernails digging deep into my skin, and pulled me backward toward the kitchen before I could even turn my head.
"In here," she breathed into my ear, her voice barely a thread. "Move. Now."
