THE LAST VOICE NOTE

Everyone else deletes voice notes.

Maya kept them.

She kept them the way some people keep ticket stubs or dried flowers pressed into old books proof that something real had once happened. Proof that she had once been loved in a voice that knew her name.

Her phone was full of them. Laughing ones. Sleepy ones. Angry ones sent and unsent. But there was only one she played over and over, usually late at night when the city outside her window went quiet enough to hear her own breathing.

It was from her father.

"Hey, sunshine," the voice note began, slightly distorted, like it had been recorded while walking. "I just wanted to hear your voice, but since I missed you this will have to do. Call me when you can. I love you. Always."

It was twenty seven seconds long.

He sent it on a Tuesday. He died on a Thursday.

At first, Maya couldn’t listen to it without breaking. The sound of his voice felt like standing too close to a fire warm, familiar, and painful all at once. So she avoided it. Weeks passed. Then months. She told herself she was healing.

She was lying.

Healing, she learned, wasn’t about forgetting. It was about learning how to carry the weight without letting it crush you.

On nights when sleep refused to come, Maya would lie in bed and scroll through her phone. Everyone else seemed to be moving forward—engagements, promotions, babies with names she couldn’t pronounce. Time marched on, completely unimpressed by her grief.

That’s when she would press play.

"Hey, sunshine…"

She started to notice details she had missed before. The way he cleared his throat. The faint sound of traffic in the background. How he said always, like it was a promise he fully intended to keep.

Sometimes she talked back.

"I know, Dad," she whispered. "I should call more. I’m trying."
Her voice felt small in the dark.

One night, while replaying the note for the hundredth time, her phone slipped from her hand and landed face down on the bed. The screen lit up with a notification:

Storage almost full.

She ignored it.

A few days later, the phone froze, restarted, froze again.

Panic crept in slowly, like cold water seeping into her shoes.

At the repair shop, the technician barely looked up. "You should back up your files," he said casually. "Especially voice notes. They are easy to lose."

Maya’s heart began to race.

"Can you… can you make sure nothing gets deleted?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I’ll do my best." He said it the way people do when they don’t realize what best actually costs.

That night, Maya sat on her floor, surrounded by charging cables and old notebooks, and cried harder than she had in months. Not because her phone might break, but because she was terrified of losing the last proof that her father had existed in sound, not just memory.

She realized then how fragile love becomes once it turns digital.

The next morning, she did something she had been avoiding for a long time.

She recorded a voice note.

"Hi, Dad," she said, her voice shaking. "It’s me. I know you can’t answer. But I wanted you to know I finally applied for that job you kept telling me about. And I’m scared. But I think you’d be proud of me. I miss you. I love you. Always."

She saved it. Backed it up. Saved it again.

When she picked up her phone from the repair shop, everything was intact.

The relief was overwhelming, but something had shifted.

That night, she played his voice note once more. Then she did something new.

She smiled.

Not because it didn’t hurt.

But because love, she realized, doesn’t live in a file or a device. It lives in what it teaches us to do next.

She didn’t need to press play every night anymore.

She still kept the voice note.

But now, she was learning how to live the always he had promised.

And somehow, that felt like the reply he had been waiting for.