No return address. Just her name, handwritten in a script she hadn’t seen in years. Whatever was inside, it wasn’t meant for the world. It was meant for her.
The parcel was small, ordinary at a glance, yet it carried the weight of a secret.
She carried it upstairs the way one carries glass careful, almost guilty. Inside, a single folded note: “Nora, for your safekeeping. Go through them once done, do what you need to do.”
She didn’t have to unfold the pages to know what they were. Not confessions, not keepsakes. They had the structure of something else: records, observations, lines that demanded continuity. A handover, like passing a patient’s chart at the end of a shift where every word mattered, because to miss a detail was to risk a life.
She placed the stack in her drawer, turned the key, and stepped back. The lock clicked, but the presence of the parcel lingered in the room, louder than silence.
Nora pulled on her shoes. When the weight of thought grew too heavy, she walked. Movement gave her momentum each step loosened the tight knots in her mind.
The night air carried a faint smell of rain, and the street- lamps cast halos that stretched and collapsed her shadow as she moved beneath them.
Memories of Nita surfaced as they always did when the world grew quiet. Their friendship had never been deliberate it was something she had stumbled into, the way she stumbled into most things. Nita had a way of drawing people into her current, whether they swam willingly or not.
And Nora she had always been the accidental one. Responsibility seemed to find her wherever she stood: a patient’s cry in the corridor, a colleague’s confession over coffee, a stranger’s silent plea for help.
Now this, too, had fallen into her hands by accident. Another shift she hadn’t signed up for, passed to her simply because she was in the right place at the right time.
She slowed her pace, feeling the key press into her pocket, the weight of it like a new organ she had to learn to carry.
It struck her then: this wasn’t the end of anything. It felt more like the beginning of a new operating system.
One she hadn’t asked for. One she didn’t know how to run. But it was already installed, humming quietly in the background.
The handover was complete the shift was now hers.
As she walked, Nita’s voice returned, insistent and steady, the way she always sounded when she wanted to be obeyed: “Observe. Continue. You’ll know what to do.”
The trouble was, Nora wasn’t sure what she needed to do.
