A lot few minutes later, my mom rushed in, looking scared, and told me,
“Sweetheart… where did you see Daddy?”

I blinked. “Just now. He was here. He told me not to ever leave you alone. Then he kissed me and left.”

Her face turned pale. She sank to the floor and began to cry, hugging me tightly.

“Baby… your dad passed away two hours ago. At the hospital.”

I didn’t understand it then. I just held her, confused, while she trembled in my arms.

Years later, I would come to believe it was his way of saying goodbye. His last message, to make sure I’d always be there for her — because he knew she’d need me.

And I was.
I never left her side.

After that night, things were never the same.

Mom didn’t talk much about what had happened. I could see she was trying to move on, but her eyes had lost the light they used to have. As for me, I couldn’t forget the moment Dad appeared to me — alive, calm, and asking me to protect her.

Months passed… but then, strange things started happening.

One night, while I was alone in my room, my favorite toy — a small red car — rolled across the floor by itself. I stared at it, frozen. The windows were shut, no one else was around. Then I heard it… a whisper.

“Remember what I told you…”

It was his voice. Faint, but unmistakable.

I ran to Mom, heart pounding, but when I told her, she just hugged me and said, “Sometimes we hear things we miss.”

But it didn’t stop.

Over the next few weeks, I would smell his cologne randomly in the hallway. Lights would flicker when I walked past certain spots. And every time something strange happened, I felt… calm. Protected.

Until one night, I found a photo slipped under my bedroom door. One I’d never seen before.

It was a picture of Dad — standing in front of a small wooden cabin in the woods. And on the back, in his handwriting:

“Don’t let her find it.”

I didn’t know what “it” was.

But I was about to find out.

The photo left me breathless. I had never seen that wooden cabin before. We didn’t even know Dad had a place like that. But the note on the back haunted me:

“Don’t let her find it.”

Who was her? And what was it that she wasn’t supposed to find?

The next day, while Mom was at work, I opened Dad’s old wardrobe. I had never dared before. At the bottom of a drawer, beneath some of his old flannel shirts, I found a small leather-bound notebook. The cover was worn, and the pages smelled like time itself.

The first page just had a date.
“March 2nd.”
That was the day he died.

Flipping through the pages, I found sketches of symbols, maps, even a few entries written in a shaky hand. Some pages were in English. Others… I couldn’t understand.

But one phrase repeated itself again and again:
“Protect her. She must never remember.”

I felt a chill crawl down my spine.

That night, Mom was unusually quiet. She sat on the couch staring at nothing, almost like she was trying to remember something… or trying not to.

Suddenly, the lights flickered. And the front door creaked open — even though it was locked.

A voice whispered again, barely audible, right beside my ear:

“She’s starting to remember. You have to find the cabin. Now.”