The Letter with no Reply.

💌 EPISODE 1: The Letter with No Reply

She wrote letters to her dead sister every morning… until one day, someone wrote back.

For 12 years, she wrote letters to her dead sister, folded, signed and hidden.

Then a stranger handed her a letter… with her name on it.

Welcome to the emotional journey of Elena Dragomir, a woman bound by grief, guilt, and a silence she never questioned.

Episode 1 is here, read, feel, share.

Her story is only just beginning.

📣 Share this story with someone who needs it.

📖 FULL STORY BELOW 👇

Elena Dragomir had made silence her religion. Not just quiet in the room, silence of the soul, of the memories that begged to speak and of the guilt that clawed at the corners of her mind.

For twelve long years, she lived like that, tucked away in a quiet corner of Brașov, a cobbled Romanian town where the wind whistled through narrow alleys like ghosts searching for names.

Every morning, before the city stirred, Elena sat cross-legged on the wooden floor of her apartment.

She wore the same faded wool sweater, she brewed a cup of bitter black tea, and she wrote one letter every single day folded precisely in half. Signed at the bottom.

“Love, Elena.”

But these letters were not for anyone who could answer, they were for Irena.

Irena had been everything Elena wasn’t; confident, wild and brave.

She would sing loudly in the house, even if her voice cracked. She wore red lipstick at fifteen and dyed her hair blue the week before their mother’s funeral.

Irena had been life and now, she was just memory.

The crash had happened on a morning not unlike this one, cold, quiet, beautiful in the cruel way winter can be.

Elena had been seventeen. Irena, twenty.

They had left early for the bus to Bucharest. Irena was starting her first internship, she was so excited she barely slept the night before.

“Today’s the day, Lena,” she said, brushing snow from her coat.

“Today, the world meets Irena Dragomir.”

She never made it, a truck skidded on black ice.

Two seconds, one spin, one scream, and then silence.

Elena didn’t speak for two months after the funeral.

Not even to her aunt, who took her in.

Not to the therapist.

Not to her diary.

But then, the letters began.

One morning, she picked up a pen and wrote: “I don’t know how to live without you.”

It became a ritual, no healing, no closure, a bleeding that never stopped, but somehow kept her standing.

Now, twelve years later, Elena was a woman of routine.

She worked in a secondhand bookstore, three blocks from her flat. She restored old books in the back room, brushing dust from forgotten pages, bringing broken spines back to life while hers remained hunched.

She spoke when spoken to, smiled politely, drank black tea and said no to invitations, no to parties and no to change. Her world was safe, small, and predictable.

Until that morning, the letter she wrote that day was short, blunt, unlike her usual poetic grief.

“You would’ve turned 30 today.

I wonder if your hair would be short now.

I wonder if you’d still sing off-key.

I wonder if I’d still be angry at you…

…for dying.”

She paused, pen hovering mid-air.

Had she ever admitted that?

That she was angry?

She tucked the letter under her bed with the others, over four thousand in total, bundled and tied with red ribbon and nd she went to work.

The bell above the bookstore door jingled at 9:06 a.m. It was raining lightly, the kind of drizzle that made everything feel dreamlike.

A tall man entered, wearing a beige coat and a brown wool scarf. His face was half-shadowed, but he walked straight to the counter with a book in his hand, a battered poetry collection by Mihai Eminescu.

“I think this is yours,” he said, placing it down gently.

Elena blinked, She didn’t recognize the book.

“I…… I don’t think we carry this edition,” she replied softly.

He just smiled and nodded toward the back room.

“I found it in the biography section, maybe someone misplaced it.”

Before she could respond, he placed a small envelope on top of the book and slid it towards her. It had no stamp, no handwriting.

Just her name Elena Dragomir printed in clean, typed letters.

She looked up to ask who he was but the man had already turned.

By the time she stepped outside, the street was empty.

Back at her desk, her hands were trembling, Elena stared at the envelope. Her name was boldly written, nothing else.

She opened it carefully, her heart pounding like a funeral drum and inside was a single note, typed and simple.

“Your sister’s story isn’t finished.”

That was it.

No signature, no instructions, no explanation.

For the rest of the day, Elena worked in silence, the envelope burning a hole in her pocket.

She kept glancing over her shoulder, Listening for footsteps, Watching shadows move behind the stained-glass door.

No one came. That night, she made tea but couldn’t drink it. She sat on her bed, knees to her chest, the letter in her hand.

It had been twelve years since anyone had spoken Irena’s name aloud to her.

And now — this.

“Your sister’s story isn’t finished.”

But how?

Why now?

And how did they know?

She pulled out the letter she had written earlier that morning, read it again “…I wonder if I’d still be angry at you…for dying.”

She folded it tightly.

Then, something strange happened.

For the first time since she began writing these letters…She didn’t put it in the box.

Instead, she placed it on the windowsill and left it open. Like she wanted it read, like she was finally tired of writing to the dead.

That night, Elena dreamed.

She stood in the middle of a frozen lake.

Snow fell silently.

In the distance, a figure in red walked slowly towards her, the coat unmistakable. Irena’s from the day she died.

But before Elena could call out, the figure raised a hand and pointed behind her, Elena turned and saw a door in the ice…Old, Rusted, Chained.

From the other side, someone knocked once, then twice, then silence.

She woke with a scream lodged in her throat and just like that, silence no longer felt safe.

It felt… hunted.

📣 Share this story with someone who needs it.

🔚 To Be Continued in Episode 2: “The Box Beneath the Floorboards”