The Calling

The day I found the briefcase - and what came flooding back

I knew what was in it.

That’s the part I never told anyone. When I found the briefcase that winter morning, I wasn’t surprised. I knew exactly what was inside — cards, letters, photographs, journals, thirty-three years of a love story I had put away and refused to acknowledge.

My first instinct was to hide it again.

I was already thinking about where to put it when something stopped me. I can’t explain it except to call it what it was — a calling. I sat down on the stairs, and I opened it.

The past came flooding back.

Everything inside was frozen in time, exactly as I had left it. A photo album. Handwritten journals. One of her favorite novels with a letter from her still tucked inside the pages. It felt like I had slipped through a wormhole. Each memento I uncovered pulled me deeper in.

What I didn’t expect — what I couldn’t have prepared for — was the grief.

I hadn’t grieved Nicole’s death. Not really. The world grieved loudly, publicly, endlessly, while the media and the defense team maligned her character — through courtrooms and cameras and verdicts. I had grieved by locking everything away. I thought that was enough.

It wasn’t.

Sitting on those stairs, I felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in over three decades. Not anger. Not bitterness. Something quieter and more unexpected.

Relief. And then the overwhelming sense that this story wasn’t mine alone to keep.

I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with it. That answer came later, after my own brush with death. But in that moment on the stairs, one thing was clear:

This wasn’t meant to stay locked away.

The Forgotten Briefcase publishes June 16th. Pre-sale begins June 1st. Subscribe to read what didn’t make it into the book.