My son died fifteen years ago, on a rainy Thursday night.
Sometimes I still see the headlights in my dreams — the split second between the screech of tires and silence. He was seventeen. His name was Jacob.
People tell you time heals, that grief softens. They’re wrong. It doesn’t heal; it just hides. It sits behind everyday things — behind coffee cups and grocery lists — waiting for a sound, a smell, or a certain song to pull it out again.
For me, it’s the phone.
Jacob used to call me every night after he got home from work. “Just checking in, Mom,” he’d say. Even after all these years, I’ve never been able to delete his number. It sits there, in my contacts, frozen in time.
Last night, at 3:04 a.m., that number called me.
At first, I thought I was dreaming. The ringtone was the same one I’d had all those years ago — his ringtone. My heart stopped before my brain caught up. I just stared at the screen, watching his name flash in the dark.
“Jacob.”
My fingers were trembling. I should have dismissed it — assumed it was some glitch or a scam. But grief doesn’t reason. It hopes.
I answered.
There was silence at first. Then, a sound — faint static, like the hum of an old radio. And then… breathing.
“Hello?” My voice cracked. “Who is this?”
A pause.
Then, soft and familiar — “Mom?”
My whole body went cold.
It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. But that voice — the tone, the tiny hitch in the “m,” the way he said it — I knew it as surely as I knew my own heartbeat.
“Jacob?”
Another breath. Then: “I’m sorry.”
The line went dead.
I sat frozen, the phone pressed to my ear long after the call ended, staring at the darkness around me. Every rational part of my mind screamed impossible, but some smaller, quieter part whispered what if…?
I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
By morning, the rational explanations began to form.
A prank. A recycled number. Some cruel coincidence.
But when I opened my call log, the number wasn’t there. No record of any call.
Still, the call had happened. I remembered every second of it — the sound, the voice, the words.
I went to work in a daze, the same insurance office where I’ve worked for twenty years. My coworker, Emily, noticed.
“You okay, Marissa? You look pale.”
I almost told her. I almost said, My dead son called me last night.
But I didn’t. Because saying it out loud would make it sound crazy — and what if it was?
That evening, when I came home, I found myself pulling out Jacob’s old phone. I’d kept it in a box, along with his school ID, his watch, and a half-finished notebook of song lyrics. I charged the phone for the first time in years.
When it turned on, the wallpaper appeared — a photo of us at the lake, his arm slung around me, both of us squinting into the sun.
For a moment, I just looked at it, my throat tight. Then I checked the call history.
Nothing.
Except one outgoing call.
Made at 3:04 a.m.
To my number.
My hands started shaking so violently I almost dropped the phone. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh or scream. It didn’t make sense. The SIM card shouldn’t even work anymore.
I called the service provider. They said the number had been inactive for over a decade.
So how had it called me?
That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the last thing he said: “I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? For dying? For leaving?
I dug through old emails and files, things I hadn’t looked at in years. Accident reports. Police statements. I thought I’d made peace with what happened — but grief makes you rewrite your own history when it wants answers.
He’d been driving home after a late shift at the diner. Lost control on a wet curve. They said he died instantly.
But there’d been another car.
A dark sedan that left the scene before police arrived. They never found it. I’d pushed the detail away back then, because I couldn’t bear to think someone else might’ve been involved — and walked away.
Now that single, unfinished piece of the story began to burn.
What if Jacob knew who it was? What if that was what the call meant — “I’m sorry”?
The next few days blurred. I barely ate. Barely slept. I kept the two phones beside each other like relics — mine and his.
On the fourth night, the phone rang again.
Same ringtone. Same number. 3:04 a.m.
I answered immediately.
“Jacob?”
Static. Then breathing.
“Mom.”
I pressed the phone to my ear so hard it hurt. “Where are you?”
A pause. A soft exhale. “I didn’t mean to…”
The line cracked, his voice breaking apart like it was traveling through water.
“Didn’t mean to what?” I whispered.
Another fragment: “I was driving. I—”
The call cut out.
I screamed into the empty room, “Jacob, please!”
But the line was dead again.
By sunrise, I was sitting in my car outside the police station, holding the accident file I’d requested years ago.
I went through every photo, every note. Then one detail made my breath catch.
The second car — the one that fled — had been described by a witness as a silver Honda.
That was my car.
For several long minutes, I just stared at the page, unable to breathe. The words began to rearrange themselves in my mind until something I’d buried started to surface.
Flashes. Rain. Headlights. The scream of tires.
I’d always remembered being at home that night — the officer telling me there’d been an accident. But memory isn’t a photograph. It’s a story we tell ourselves.
What if I’d rewritten it?
What if the truth was something I couldn’t live with — so I didn’t?
The rest came back in fragments.
Jacob had called me that night — his final call. I’d been on my way to pick him up, angry because he was late again. It was raining, my hands tight on the wheel, my phone lighting up on the seat beside me.
I remember looking down.
Just for a second.
The blinding headlights. The sound of impact.
The car I hit.
His car.
I must have blacked out. When I woke in the hospital, they told me he was gone — that he’d lost control and crashed. I believed them, because the alternative would have destroyed me.
Fifteen years I lived with that lie, because my mind chose to protect itself.
Until last night.
Until his voice called me back.
“I’m sorry.”
Not because of what he did — but because he knew. Because in that final instant, he saw me.
I sit here now, the two phones on the table. Mine and his.
The morning light is pouring through the kitchen window. The world looks the same as it always has, but everything inside me has changed.
I scroll through my call log one last time. There’s still no record of the calls. Maybe there never were any. Maybe it was my mind finally letting the truth through — grief’s cruel way of forcing me to remember.
I’ll never know if that voice was real or just the echo of guilt.
But I do know this: when I heard him say “Mom,” it didn’t sound angry. It sounded… forgiving.
And maybe that’s all I ever needed.
