“I’ll stay and help you go through it, Grandma,” she said, gently pushing her mother toward the door.

Once Susan left, the apartment felt quiet again.

Chloe and I sat at the kitchen table and opened the first box.

It was filled with his old college hoodies, some framed photos, and a stack of blue crossword puzzle books from his final year of life.

I picked up the books, my fingers tracing the worn edges of the covers.

Daniel always used a black ballpoint pen, pressing so hard that you could feel the indentation of his words on the next page.

I flipped through the pages, seeing his messy print in the margins.

There were grocery lists for milk and bread, phone numbers for his mechanic, and silly little jokes he’d written down.

It felt like he was in the room with me.

But then I opened the very last blue book to the final page, dated the exact week he passed.

My breath caught in my throat.

Daniel hadn’t filled in a single crossword clue on the left.

Instead, he had used the black ink to write directly inside the empty white squares of the grid.

Each letter was printed inside its own tiny box, spanning across the entire page.

My stomach dropped as I read the very first line.

“Mom, my chest has been hurting all week.”

I fell back into my chair, my hand covering my mouth to muffle the sob rising in my throat.

Chloe leaned over my shoulder, her eyes widening as she saw the page.

“Oh my god,” she whispered.

He had known.

Daniel had known his heart was failing, and he had never told me because he didn’t want me to worry.

I stared at the page, my hands shaking so badly I almost dropped the book.

In his careful, blocky handwriting, he had written a letter to me across the grid.

I read the words out loud, my voice cracking on every line.

“Mom, my chest has been hurting all week. The doctor says I need to go to the hospital, but I wanted to write this first, just in case.

I know you’re going to be mad at me for not telling you. But you’ve spent your whole life worrying about me, and I wanted you to have one week of peace.”

I closed my eyes, a tear slipping down my cheek.

I could almost hear his voice saying those exact words.

I opened my eyes and kept reading.

“I want to thank you for every Sunday. Thirty years of Sundays. When I was homesick in college, those phone calls were the only thing that kept me from packing my bags and running home. When Sarah and I split up, I sat in my empty apartment waiting for two o’clock just to hear your voice.”