A Week with Katherine

One Year After

I know Katherine wasn't the person that everyone in town thought she was.

And, maybe she wasn't even the person I remember.

Maybe, she had just been an average girl. Alone, sad, and confused.

It's hard to accept the fact that I could be wrong; that I was just another person fooled by the glamor that was Katherine.

I obviously haven't been able to move on. Even though I'm trying I can't let what happened go.

I moved away. I started college. I made new friends. But, I can't shake the feeling that something horrible is still happening.

Everyone says that I'm obsessed and I used to think they were wrong but maybe they are actually right.

My worries only got worse when last week Katherine's mom reached out to me.

Apparently, she's leaving Sorrow's Creek and is moving back to New York.

Which I get. It's hard to have fond memories in that town and it's not like Maryland was very fun to live in anyway.

She wanted to meet up for coffee and to give me something.

I probably shouldn't have gone. But, the curiosity was too much for me.

Katherine's mom is a sweet lady but seeing her just brought back a lot of unresolved things for me. Plus, it was a little awkward.

They weren't kidding when they said curiosity killed the cat.

At the end of our coffee meeting, she said that she found something while cleaning out Katherine's room. It was a diary.

I couldn't believe it.

She handed me this blue envelope and told me, "Katherine wrote about you a lot towards the end. You were a good friend to her. I'm glad she met you. I made a copy of a few of the entries for you, I thought you might like to have them."

I couldn't exactly argue with that, so I took the envelope and said "thank you," and then-

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"What did the entries say?" My therapist interrupted me for the first time since our session had started snapping me out of my retelling of what happened.

She leaned forward in her seat. Her notepad was abandoned by her side as she waited for me to answer her.

"I- I don't know. I haven't read them. That's why I'm here. I don't know if I should." I admitted as I held the unopened envelope in my hand.

The edges bent as I had been nervously fiddling with them nearly the entire session.

"Why not?" My therapist asked in surprise. Her eyes widened.

"It feels wrong. Katherine said she believed in something after death. And, now that's all that I can hope for, too. She was a pretty upfront person so if whatever she wrote was something she actually wanted me to know she would have told me before what happened happened. I'd like to believe she trusted me and don't want to betray her. She never got the privacy she deserved then and I don't want to continue that trend."

Dr.Goldman didn't say anything right away before finally picking up her notepad and writing something down.

"That's very moral of you." She replied curtly, the disapproval she felt poorly hidden.

"But?" I asked.

"I think if you were to read them it might help give you some closure. James, I'm the fourth therapist you've seen since-"