Another Page Burned, Another Soul Broken
Another page scrawled with barely legible writing began to burn, curling into itself as the hot orange-red crept up towards Sam's fingers. She watched it intently as it turned to ash on the tabletop in front of her and at the last moment, dropped the remaining triangle of paper onto the pile, before flame touched skin.
Reaching for another page – another letter from him – she began the process again, her heart breaking just that little bit more as it dissolved before her eyes. By the time she had gotten through the entire collection, she was sure that there would be nothing left of her. As it was, she was already finding it hard to go on and the likelihood of that changing was phenomenally low.
Every page into the fire burnt her through and while she had yet to disintegrate into miniscule bits of matter like the letters she sacrificed, she'd never been so broken before in her entire life. That included her mother's death and her father's passing only a few years before. She made it through those times, if not unscathed, then at least willing to go on and try to be happy again.
Now, all she wanted to do was crawl into a dark, warm place to cry. She wanted to die.
She retrieved the final piece of paper to be destroyed from beside her, this one written by someone else, and unlike all the others took the time to read it. The words stung her like a knife in her gut, as they had done when she first read them.
"Sam, I'm so sorry. Cameron's dead."