My Sister Called Me a Year After Her Funeral

I was brushing my teeth when I saw the missed call.

It was nearly midnight, and I was getting ready for bed after a long day. I picked up my phone, casually checking notifications. That’s when I saw it.

1 Missed Call — Zara (8:47 p.m.)

Zara.

My sister.

Who had been dead for almost a year.

My heart froze.

It had to be a mistake. Maybe someone reused her number. Maybe it was a glitch. But the number was still saved in my phone — the same one we had called endlessly after she disappeared last winter.

She was found two weeks later in the woods behind her college campus. They said it was suicide. I never believed it. Zara was bright, sharp, and full of plans. She had just submitted her grad school applications. She had been helping Mom recover from surgery. She had been fine.

But the evidence had been clear. Or so they said.

And now… she had called me.

I tapped on the call log. The number was hers.

No new owner. No spoofing app. Just her number.

I stared at it for a long moment before pressing play on the voicemail.

The message started with static. Faint, crackling silence. Then came a voice — distant, breathless.

“I don’t have much time. They’re watching. Don’t trust him. He’s not who you think. I tried to tell you before—”

Then a gasp. Then silence.

I dropped the phone. My knees buckled, and I sat on the floor, heart thudding like a drum.

Who was she talking about?

Don’t trust who?

I replayed the message four times, trying to pull more out of it, but the audio was fragmented, as if someone had recorded it in a tunnel. Still, I knew her voice. I’d recognize it anywhere.

That was Zara.

But how could she have left a voicemail tonight, eleven months after she was buried?

The next morning, I didn’t go to work. I spent hours trying to trace the call. I contacted the phone company, who told me — casually, like it was normal — that the number had pinged a tower in my city, just three hours before I received the voicemail.

“But that’s impossible,” I told the rep. “The person who owned that number died. Last year.”

There was silence on the other end. Then, hesitantly:

“Well… someone is using it now.”

I opened Zara’s old laptop. Mom had kept it locked in her closet, unable to look at it. I needed to find something — anything.

Her desktop was a mess, but hidden in a folder called “Journal_Backup,” I found files labeled with dates from her last month alive. Most of them were poems, diary entries, and reminders.

Except one.

A Word document titled: “If Something Happens to Me.”

My breath caught. I clicked.

“If you’re reading this, then I’m probably gone.”

“This is not a suicide. I need you to believe that. There’s someone following me. I don’t know who he is, but he shows up everywhere—outside my lectures, near our house, even at Mom’s pharmacy.”

“I think he’s trying to scare me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because of the internship… maybe I saw something I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Please show this to Anaya. She’ll believe me.”

My name. She had left this for me. And no one ever saw it — until now.

My hands were shaking. I saved the file, printed it, and walked straight into the police station.

I gave the voicemail. The email. The file. The detective assigned to Zara’s case looked at me like I was crazy. But she took the USB I brought.

Later that evening, I received a call back.

“You said your sister interned at Harrington & Holt, right?”

I nodded. “In their research division. Why?”

The detective sighed.

“One of their senior employees was arrested three months ago for tampering with government grant records. We think your sister might have discovered something related. It’s possible her death wasn’t what we thought.”

Zara had tried to tell me.

But I didn’t listen when she was alive.

Now she had found a way to reach me anyway.

And this time, I heard her.

Her case is open again now. The voicemail was real. The call was traced to a prepaid phone registered under a fake name — someone with ties to the same company.

We don’t know yet who sent the message, or how, or why the number was still active. But the truth is coming. And my sister… she never really left.

She was waiting for me to find it.