Tearing the wax seal on the envelope, Kayla swallowed hard, wishing even more that her homework was some grueling lab report from her second year of med school rather than the required reading she was bringing on herself.
Letting out a slow breath, though, she eyed the yellow rose and her non-trembling hand, reassuring herself she was doing the right thing even if it gave her a gnawing feeling in her gut.
"I told you I've accumulated secrets since I got back. Well, I accumulated some other things, too," Kayla said, holding up the opened letter and the envelope marked return to sender.
"Now, before you get angry, or Victor smites me with some Kiriakis brand lightning bolt he's probably fashioned by now, you can both blame your pride and joy for locking me in a wine cellar and leaving me so off balance I didn't even remember putting the letter in my pocket. It probably would've gone through the wash if Stephanie hadn't found it and given it back to me," Kayla said as she looked down at both the letters, realizing they had more in common than she thought.
May 2023
"Hi, my love. It's just me. Everything's okay," Kayla assured, flopping backward onto the bed with her hair still damp from her bubble bath and wearing nothing but a fuzzy pale pink robe. Putting her phone on speaker, thumbing to her texts, she curled back against the bed pillows.
"I got your check-in text letting me know you're alright, but I wanted to talk to you. I just worked my first shift back at the hospital," she said with a proud smile that soon went sly.
"And after I got off, I came home and took a hot bath to relax. Lavender soap, lots of bubbles. Lots of memories," she said. "And now I'm in our bed, and I'm not sleepy. It's like when I came to see you in Prague and I wanted to chase down the DiMeras in the middle of the night. Remember you came up with something better for us to do? I was thinking about that...and I was thinking I'd call. See if maybe I could get a hold of you, hear your voice. I know you really need to finish this case, but I really miss you. It's been so hard being here without you. I'm sure it's even harder for you, and I'm pretty sure if we talked for a while, it'd make us both feel a lot better, so...if you get this message, try and give me a- "
Interrupted by a loud thud at the door, Kayla shot up in bed and immediately grabbed the baseball bat she kept between it and her nightstand.
"Okay, don't know if you heard that, Steve, but I have the bat. I have my phone and I...If I end the call, I'm just calling 911, alright? I love you! I…I love you," she whispered as she slipped the phone into her robe pocket.
Tiptoing out of the bedroom and down the hallway, hearing a follow-up thud she tightened her grip on the bat, chewing her lip as she made her way towards the front door.
"Who is it?!" she squeaked out as the knob turned. Not getting an answer, she wielded the bat and screamed as the door swung open, only to get screamed at right back.
"Mom!"
"Stephanie!"
Rolling her eyes, adjusting her grip on the awkwardly large storage bin she was holding, after Kayla lowered the bat, Stephanie brushed past her into the living room.
"What other woman is out there calling you Mom even as you're about to crack her skull open?"
Shaking her head, Kayla ran a hand through her hair.
"Baby girl, I didn't…"
"You know we really need to stop meeting like this!" Stephanie scoffed, setting the bin on the coffee table only to feel guilt hit her at the guilty, wary expression on her mother's face.
"I know. I'm sorry. I just wasn't expecting company, then I heard this loud thud and-"
Realizing her phone was still on the voicemail with Steve, Kayla fished it out of her robe pocket.
"Sorry, Steve. False alarm. Everything's fine. Stephanie's here. Just stopped by for a short visit. But we're fine! Everything's fine. Just call me when you can, alright? I love you."
Hanging up, she gave Stephanie a sheepish look while she gave her a knowing one.
"What?"
"You know I have no problem making this more than a short visit, right?"
"Stephanie, I'm-"
"Mom, you answered the door with a baseball bat and Papa on the other line."
"I was in the middle of leaving your dad a voicemail when I heard the noise and came out here."
"And you were trying to perfect your swing for the SUH softball team, too?" Stephanie snorted as Kayla moved to sit on the couch, rolling her eyes before they clouded over.
"It's okay if everything's not fine yet, Mom. You can tell Papa that as much as you want to make him feel better about being away, but you can't fool-"
"I'm not trying to fool anyone, Stephanie. I got nervous hearing a loud noise outside my front door. It doesn't mean I need my daughter babysitting me or-"
"Who said anything about babysitting?" Stephanie argued. "I just brought over this storage bin, and I know it's going to take more than a short visit for us to go through what's in it. And if that visit lasts as long as Papa's away, is that really so bad?"
"I don't think that Chad and Charlotte and Thomas are going to be thrilled," Kayla argued back.
"Mom, you don't-"
"You just told me you're going to start looking for apartments with them. The last thing you should be doing is holing up in this one with me, going through old boxes of…I don't even know," she scoffed, poking through the storage bin as Stephanie sat beside her on the couch.
"I think if I asked Chad and the kids, they'd say making up for lost time with you is exactly what I should be doing," she said as Kayla stopped rummaging and tearfully turned to face her daughter, who pulled her into a hug.
"You do not play fair. You know that?" she sighed as Stephanie smirked before pulling back.
"Well, I know you're missing Dad. I figured you wouldn't mind my trying to channel him a little."
"Try a lot," Kayla smirked. "Here you are, giving me a hard time. A big project to distract me."
"Yeah, a big project in the biggest, bulkiest, awkward sized storage bin known to man," Stephanie muttered as Kayla nodded in agreement.
"I thought the same thing when I moved in and wrestled it onto the top shelf of my closet. And that once I got it up there, I was content to leave it there," Kayla said as Stephanie shrugged.
"Well, Papa didn't ask, but I didn't know how content he'd be having it up there still after we thought you were..."
Hearing her voice trail off Kayla sighed, tears springing to her eyes again.
"I knew he'd want to go through it, but I knew it was mostly our stuff from LA, so I figured if anyone should, it should be-."
"Baby."
Reaching over she stroked Stephanie's hair back.
"I am so-"
"I swear, Mom. If you apologize one more time for what those sociopaths did to you, I'm taking that baseball bat to this bin and making it way less big and bulky."
"Okay, okay!" Kayla exclaimed. "No more. I promise."
"Thank you. Besides, I'd rather focus on figuring out what led you to keep half the things I found in here," Stephanie scoffed, picking up a Hello Kitty folder with one hand and a solar system cardboard box diorama in the other.
"That was the first science project you put together without my help. And this was your "Hey Mom, look at this" folder," Kayla said, taking it from her and protectively holding it.
"I'm sorry, my what folder?"
"Each time you had something from school you wanted to show me, you put it in this folder on my desk and as soon as I got home from a shift, the first thing I'd do was look through it. Whenever there was a good grade or you finished up some big project, at the end of the week or when I wasn't on call, I'd make sure we'd go out and do something fun or-"
"Manicure Mondays!" Stephanie recalled with a grin as Kayla nodded.
"Now do you see why I hold onto things like this?"
"And here I just thought you were a packrat."
"Well, there's that, too," Kayla smirked, sifting through the bin some more as Stephanie got to her feet and walked over to the kitchen.
"Can we try to get rid of some of the stuff in there before we put it back on the shelf? The last thing I want is us throwing our backs out while I'm hanging out here," she said, opening the fridge as something sticking out of the side of the bin caught Kayla's eye.
"If we lift with our legs, we'll be fine, baby girl," she mumbled, grabbing her readers from the side sofa table.
"Unless I get a hernia," Stephanie muttered, reluctantly grabbing a nonfat yogurt from the fridge.
"You know if you come back from the dead, you're allowed to spring for full fat, Mom," she scoffed, closing the fridge and walking back to the couch.
"If you don't believe me ask Marlena. I'm sure she'd back me-"
Stopping short, Stephanie bit her lip, seeing Kayla studying an open bubble envelope with a British postmark stamped on the front, and also seeing the bright pink card and the smaller envelope resting on her lap.
Sitting back down, she reached for the card with a smiling teddy bear holding a balloon bouquet on the front. Flipping it open, her eyes flitted over the neatly written cursive, hand-drawn smiley face and a loopy signature she could barely read but still managed to recognize.
"A birthday card that never made it to the kitchen fridge. This should be framed, put in a museum," Stephanie quipped as Kayla ran a hand over her face, shaking her head in disbelief.
"I mean if the 'look at this' folder had been a thing when I was four, maybe-"
"Stephanie."
"The bubble mailer was unsealed, Mom," she said after a beat. "UK envelope glue doesn't have much stick, I guess."
"Can't really expect it to after twenty nine years, though, right?" Kayla sighed.
"I wasn't going to open it. That mailer may have held stuff for both Johnson women but it was addressed to you. If my card..and the one there for you, hadn't come falling out of it I never would've..."
"You know this probably wound up buried under a heap of med school applications on my desk," Kayla interrupted, waving the bubble mailer. "Some pre-K fingerpaintings of yours, too, if I had to guess."
"Well, it's not buried under anything now. And neither are these," Stephanie said, holding up her card and nodding to the one Kayla held in her now trembling right hand.
"Mom? Are you-"
"I'm fine," Kayla cut in. "Just don't see how we're gonna sort through all this if we have to discuss every little thing I decided to hold onto and stash away in there," she scoffed, nodding to the bin as Stephanie nodded, taking a beat before speaking.
"What about just the one thing you're holding onto there. Can we discuss that?"
"Stephanie-"
"The fact your right hand hasn't stopped shaking since you picked it up? You pulled a microchip time bomb out of Papa's brain with that hand but holding a letter in it's got you-"
Trailing off when Kayla didn't respond and looked down and away, Stephanie reached over and rested her hand on top of hers.
"You gonna make me play the guilt card? No secrets-"
"No," Kayla said sharply. "I'm not," she sighed, shaking her head. "I just wish this one had stayed at the bottom of that box."