The last time I heard her laugh

A weekend that didn’t matter.

We weren’t even supposed to be at the lake that weekend.

This trip was last-minute—a borrowed cabin, borrowed time, and, as it turned out, a memory I would spend the rest of my life trying to forget.

My sister Layla was the kind of girl people noticed when she walked into a room—not because she was loud or attention-seeking, but because she was light. Her laugh could cut through tension like sunlight through storm clouds. And that weekend she laughed a lot.

She was 17. I was just 20. Maybe it was the distance, maybe the silence of the lake, but we talked like friends—not like siblings. For the first time, I felt like I knew a version of her that didn’t exist at home, except for the curfews, the fights, and the locked doors.

The voice that still echoes.

It was Sunday afternoon.

We were a stone’s throw from the dock—she was better than me, and I hated her—and I told her. She laughed.

God, she laughed.

Fast, free, defiant, and full of joy, like she knew the world couldn’t touch her.

And then she said, “I bet I could swim to that little island and back faster than you.”

I dared her.

She kicked off her shoes, peeled off her hoodie, and dove in without waiting.

I shouted, “Wait! We don’t know how deep it is—”

But she was already halfway there. I watched his arms rise and fall in strong, sure strokes. I started to tug on my shirt to follow—but then I heard him.

A sound I couldn’t explain. Not a scream, not a splash. More like… silence. As if the water had swallowed something in mid-breath.

He never came back.

I ran to the end of the dock. Nothing. The water lapping softly as if he had never entered it.

I dove in.

I don’t remember swimming, just the cold. The endless, blinding cold that felt more like panic than temperature. I called his name underwater, as if it meant anything.

But he wasn’t there.

Down. Up. Nowhere.

The search that shattered the world.

We called the rangers. Boats came. Dive dogs, helicopters. All of it.

Nothing

No body. No clothes. No sign. The police officer tried to be gentle, but his words crushed me: “Sometimes the lake…

I couldn’t move from the dock. I slept there, wrapped in his hoodie. I replayed his laugh in my head, the exact note of it, over and over, as if if I got it right it might open a door.

My parents arrived the next morning. My mother collapsed before she could reach the water. My father didn’t speak for three days.

Why would I still go back?

Every August, I return to the lake. The cabin is gone now—accidentally burned down in a fire a year later. But the dock is still there, somehow untouched by time.

I bring a rock. I drop it once. And then I wait.

One year, the water gushed without wind. Another year, a girl’s laugh—a single, echoing note—flowed across the lake even though no one was there.

I believe in ghosts. I don't.

But I believe in echoes.

And I believe the lake remembers.

She deserves better.

Layla deserved a big life. A long one. With stories, mistakes, first loves, heartbreak, and old age.

But she only got one last laugh.

And the water took everything after that.