When she woke up there were 17 voicemails from a stranger.


At first, she thought it was a glitch. Her phone screen glared in the dim light of her bedroom, numbers stacked in bold red: 17 unheard messages. She squinted at the caller ID. No name. Just an unfamiliar number.


Her heart thudded with the strange weight of it. Who leaves 17 voicemails anymore?


She pressed play.


The first was only static—like wind howling through a tunnel. Then a man’s voice broke through, faint and trembling:

“Please… please, if you’re hearing this, call me back. She’s gone.”


The second message was clearer. “I don’t know who else to reach. I dialed the wrong number but—God—it feels like the right one. You sound like her. Please, just listen.”


Her chest tightened.


By the fourth voicemail, the man was crying. By the sixth, he was whispering secrets into the receiver—things about an accident on Highway 43, about blood, about how he couldn’t get the sound of shattering glass out of his head.


By the tenth, she was shaking.


And by the seventeenth, he said something that made her drop the phone:

“You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”



---


She didn’t know what compelled her—fear, curiosity, or the way his voice carried an ache she recognized in herself—but she dialed back.


One ring. Two. Then a click.


“You answered.” His voice was raw, as though he hadn’t slept.


“I think you have the wrong number,” she managed.


“No,” he said softly. “Not wrong. I’ve been trying to find you.”


Her throat went dry. “Why?”


“Because… you were in the car.”


She froze. “That’s impossible.”


But then—her mind betrayed her. The scar that curved along her collarbone, the one she never remembered getting. The nights she woke gasping from dreams of twisted metal and headlights rushing toward her.


“What are you talking about?” she whispered.


The man exhaled, a sound equal parts relief and despair. “Your name is Clara. And five years ago, we should have died together.”



---


Her name wasn’t Clara. It was Elena. Or at least, that’s what she had always been told.


But as the hours unfolded, so did his story—fragments of a life she had no memory of. A rainy night. A wrecked car. A hospital where she had been listed as Jane Doe. And him—Jacob—standing over her, begging her to wake.


“They said you didn’t make it,” he said. “They said you were gone. And I—I believed them. Until I heard your voice last week, leaving a voicemail at the café where I work. You asked about hours. I knew it was you. I knew.”


Elena pressed a hand to her mouth. She didn’t remember calling any café. She didn’t remember him.


Yet something inside her—something buried deep—stirred.


“Why now?” she asked.


“Because some pieces don’t stay lost forever,” he said. “Because the dead don’t stay dead.”



---


The next days blurred. She tried to ignore him, delete the messages, pretend none of it was real. But everywhere she turned, there were cracks. Old notebooks in her closet with the name Clara scrawled in the margins. A jacket she didn’t remember buying that smelled faintly of cologne she now recognized as his.


And the dreams—God, the dreams. She saw his face in them, younger, laughing. She saw herself calling his name. Jacob.


By the end of the week, she met him.


They sat across from each other in a diner, two strangers bound by a story too strange to tell anyone else.


“You really don’t remember?” he asked, staring at her as if she were both ghost and miracle.


“Only flashes,” she admitted. “But they feel real.”


He nodded, tears in his eyes. “That’s enough.”



---


As they parted, he touched her hand lightly.


“Seventeen voicemails,” she murmured, almost smiling.


“I would have left seventeen more,” he said. “As many as it took for you to come back to me.”


And for the first time, Elena—or Clara, or both—felt the weight of those words anchor her. Not to the past she had lost, but to the present she could still choose.