Chapter Text
"All night I stretched my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces."- "Saying Your Names" (Richard Siken)
"Maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark."
- It (Stephen King)
Jughead slams his laptop shut and crumples on top of it, arms splayed out over his desk. As if cued by the sound of his exasperation, there’s a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Jughead groans, face still firmly planted in his arms. The door latch clicks.
“Hey, dude.” By the sounds of it, it’s Jabari, and he’s about to ask Jughead to do something he doesn’t want to do.
“Hey,” Jughead answers.
“So…” Jabari starts. Jughead sits up and swivels around in his chair to face him. He raises his eyebrows as Jabari searches for what he’s trying to say. “So, I know I was supposed to run the meeting tonight. But the thing is, this girl I've been getting together with is home alone, and she asked me to come over at five-thirty, so…can you run it? It’s super easy, literally all you have to do is come up with a prompt and then tell everyone to write for half an hour and then ask who wants to share. That’s it.”
Jughead wipes a hand over his face. It’s not like he has anything better to do. He was going to go to the meeting anyways, so it’s not like he had plans, but if he’s learned anything from spending the past year in the fiction writers’ club, it’s that getting a bunch of college students – even the ones who love writing – to sit down and write is kind of like herding cats. Cats who won’t shut the fuck up about H. P. Lovecraft.
Jughead sighs. “Okay, fine.”
“Phew.” Jabari bends over in mock exhaustion, bracing his hands on his knees. “Thanks, man, I owe you one.”
"Don't mention it," Jughead replies, and swivels back around to his desk as Jabari walks back into his own bedroom.
Jughead opens his laptop again, then stops for a moment, transfixed by a leaf falling from the tree outside his window, floating down to join the countless piles of dead, browning leaves all over campus. He blinks and turns his attention back to his computer, less intimidated by the blank screen now that he actually has something to do.
He loads up the website where they usually get the club’s weekly prompts and scrolls through the list labeled Creative Nonfiction. The week's prompt reads:
September 24th: Fall is traditionally recognized as a time of endings: leaves fall, animals hibernate, and the earth settles into its cold, quiet slumber. This week, consider both beginnings and endings. Dig through the files on your computer, the pages in your notebook, or wherever you store your ideas. Is there a story you always meant to finish? Pick it up again, and remember what made you so passionate about it in the first place.
Sure, why not.
He copies and pastes the prompt into a new doc, minimizes the window, and clicks on the folder labeled “Writing.” He’s had the same computer for going on five years, and the files are neatly organized by year, dating all the way back to his sophomore year of high school. There are plenty of unfinished pieces he could work on, but.
But.
There’s a reason he never finished those stories, and he’s not sure he wants to think about it again. He’d decided long ago that it wasn’t his job to tell Riverdale’s story. Sure, everything that happened in town would’ve made for a hell of a novel – and god knows things probably haven’t changed, have probably only gotten more chaotic in his absence – but some things don’t need to be memorialized.
Some things, he thinks, should be given the freedom to die quietly and slip from everyone’s memories. Including his own.
Instead, he opens the folder labeled College - Freshman Year and pulls up a random article that he’d never managed to finish. The writing isn’t horrible, but it’s a little hard to follow, and kind of pretentious. Thank god for the tutoring center. It really is true what they say: that teaching someone something is the best way to learn it; the improvements he’s made in his writing, even just over the past year, can attest to that. He messes around with the sentence order, swapping out especially obnoxious words here and there, until he glances at the clock and realizes he’ll have to sprint if he wants to get dinner before the club meeting.
The beginning of the meeting goes pretty smoothly, to his surprise. Probably because it’s still practically the start of the semester; the new members aren’t comfortable enough with each other to start goofing off yet. While he’s reading off the week’s prompt, his phone goes off, and he glances at the screen before shutting off the ringer and shoving it back in his pocket. It’s a Chicago number, probably a spam call.
“Sorry about that, guys. Anyways, yeah. Pick an old story you never got around to finishing, and see if you can immerse yourself in it again. Sometimes the passage of time – having a new perspective – is all you need to figure out how it should end.”
Everyone starts rifling through their backpacks, pulling out everything from ratty spiral-bound notebooks to expensive thin laptops. As he’s opening up the article from earlier, Jughead’s phone buzzes in his pocket. A quick glance at the screen alerts him that he has a voicemail. Weird.
Amid the sound of papers shuffling, he steps quietly out of the room into the hallway to check his voicemail. He presses play and holds the phone up to his ear.
“Hey, Jughead.”
Jughead feels faint, suddenly, and leans back against the wall to steady himself.
The voice on the other end is quiet – so quiet that even with the volume all the way up, he has to mash the phone against his ear to hear what she’s saying – but it’s unmistakable.
“Sorry to call you out of the blue like this, I know you’re probably wondering what’s going on – assuming this is still your number after all this time,” Mary says.
She pauses, and the silence stretches out long enough that Jughead starts getting uncomfortable. Maybe scared is a better word for it.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, I – I can barely believe it myself, but. It’s…it’s about Archie.”
Jughead notes, numbly, that he’s sliding down the wall, slowly sinking into a seated position on the floor.
“Jug, he’s gone.” Her voice breaks on the last syllable.
Jughead feels himself hit the ground.
His muscles seem to stop working; his arm drops to his side, paralyzed, sending his phone clattering across the floor, but the tinny sound of Mary choking back tears still echoes through his phone’s speaker. He’s shaking, all over, less like shivering in the cold and more like he’s being electrocuted.
He manages to regain enough control over his limbs to shove himself up off the ground, grabbing his phone and stuffing it back into his pocket without even pausing the message, and runs back into the meeting room to grab his bag.
“Sorry, I gotta go. Something came up.” The other members’ heads turn towards him as he rushes out the door again, but if anyone says anything in response, his ears are ringing too loudly to hear it.
The campus is dark and empty, thanks to the cold. Jughead barely notices the wind biting into him as he walks, his body slowly going numb from the inside out. He manages to somehow space out for the rest of the five-minute walk. He blinks and suddenly he’s outside the door to his room.
He fumbles with the keys until he manages to unlock the door, stumbling inside and dropping his bag on the floor of his bedroom. Without bothering to turn a light on, he collapses into his bed, staring off into the distance. The part of him that’s still capable of rational thought is grateful that Jabari is out tonight. His brain feels like radio static, threatening to drown everything out, and he thinks trying to hold a conversation would send him over the edge into a complete breakdown.
He manages to hold it together for a few seconds, and then he breaks down anyway. He curls up into a ball on top of his covers, grief ripping through his chest and tearing dry sobs from his lungs.
“Fuck,” he rasps, and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes like that’ll stop the tears from coming. It doesn’t.
He finally resigns himself to it and stops resisting, lets the tears and the ugly, choking sobs come. Hot tears slip down his cheeks and land on his pillowcase, and he just keeps staring at the wall.
It’s only then that he realizes he hasn’t even listened to the rest of Mary’s voicemail. He’d just barely noticed, upon getting back to his room and dropping all his stuff on the floor, that it was still playing, that Mary had been talking for at least another five minutes.
He doesn’t think he can bear to hear it, but nothing could make him feel any worse than he already does, so he sits up and grabs his phone, pulling up his voicemail app and pressing play before setting the phone on the mattress next to him.
It plays from the beginning and Jughead feels sick, hearing her say hello and knowing what comes next: He’s gone. There’s a numbing, burning sensation deep in the pit of his stomach. When Mary gets to the part he hasn’t heard yet, he tries to hold his breath, stifling his sniffles so he can hear her.
“I’m sorry. I wish you didn’t have to find out this way.” Mary takes a deep breath, steadying herself. “I’m calling you because – well, I know you and Betty used to like solving mysteries – you two did a better job than the sheriff, as far as I’m concerned.”
Hearing Betty’s name sets off a fresh wave of agony tearing through him, an old wound he’d thought healed a long time ago.
“Archie’s been gone for three weeks. He hasn’t called, hasn’t sent a letter, nothing. His social media accounts have been dead, too. There’s no sign of him, and you know him, Jug, you know he wouldn’t just leave. He’s – I know – we all know he’s dead. But they haven’t found a body yet. They – the Rockland County police – haven’t found anything. Not even a shoe, or a shred of fabric. His car’s still here – everything still is. He didn’t just leave. But none of us know what happened.” Her voice cracks again. Jughead has to pause the message again to take in her words.
Archie is gone – gone, not dead. A rash of goosebumps breaks out over his arms and the back of his neck, making him shiver.
He presses play.
“That’s all I want, Jug. Closure, I guess. I’ve been staying here, in Riverdale, since he disappeared, and I can’t stand it anymore. Well – I’m sure you understand the feeling. Riverdale isn’t a place people usually come back to. There’s nothing here for me anymore. Fred’s gone – you know that. Even Vegas is gone; according to the police, he ran off right around when Archie disappeared. Guess he knew Archie wasn’t coming back, too.”
Mary pauses for a second, and Jughead feels the gears in his head spinning frantically, digging up bits and pieces of memories about Riverdale he’d forgotten years ago.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t be calling you, asking you to come back after – what, three years? – if I had any other choice, but the truth is, I don’t have anyone else to call. I know it’s probably the last thing you want to do, come back here, but…it would mean the world to me if you did. I thought you might be able to help – you were always better at turning up things, finding the truth, writing it all up. All of that stuff. Give me a call, I guess, if you can. I know this is hard on you, too – believe me, I wouldn’t be bothering you if I thought anyone else could help. I just want answers…to know what happened to my son.”
Click.
In a daze, Jughead walks into his dorm’s kitchen and starts up the coffeepot. His thoughts are moving almost too fast to process. Once he’s made himself a cup – the first of many that night, he expects – he sits down, opens up his laptop, and starts researching.
The first result is from the Riverdale Register. So Alice is still in town, then. The article is dated September 6th, and based on the sparse details, it must be from right after Archie went missing. Knowing Alice, she probably hassled the officers on the case for as much information as they could provide, but it looks like they didn’t give her much to go on. The article lists only the most basic facts: Archie Andrews, age twenty-one, recognizable by a snake tattoo on his upper right arm and a scar from a stab wound on the right side of his stomach, was last seen on the 4th, by Pop Tate. Archie left the diner at 11 P.M., reportedly in a hurry and seeming agitated. Anyone with any information about his whereabouts is asked to contact his mother, Mary Moore.
He tells himself that he won’t check Archie’s Facebook or Instagram, knows it’ll hurt too much, but he does it anyways. There’s not much to see; Jughead unfriended him on Facebook a while back in a fit of petty vengeance, and now he regrets it.
The only posts on Archie’s Facebook wall from after the 4th are “thoughts and prayers,” “miss you bro,” “come back to us,” and other assorted messages from people Jughead doesn’t even know. There aren’t nearly as many as he would’ve expected, especially given the three-odd weeks that have elapsed since Archie disappeared, and it makes Jughead wonder what exactly he’s been up to these past few years.
He scrolls down a little further and feels like he’s been punched in the ribs, the way all the air in his lungs is suddenly ripped out of him.
It’s Archie’s face, under a big red banner that says MISSING PERSON, and he knows that photo: it’s from their senior prom night. He’d been the one to take the photo. He used to carry a copy of it in his wallet.
Archie’s wearing a tux and a red bow tie; he and Veronica had color-coordinated their outfits. His hair is sticking up everywhere, undoubtedly having been gelled down and subsequently destroyed by his nervous habit of running his hand through it. He’s smiling at the camera like he knows something it doesn’t, but because it’s Archie, it’s endearing rather than suspicious.
The contrast between Jughead’s memories of that night – cheesy but undeniably fun, all four of them laughing and falling all over each other – next to the stark black text reading out Archie’s height and weight and “date last seen” makes him feel sick.
That night – prom night – had been the last time the four of them hung out together. He can picture the aftermath of that photo too easily: how he’d put his phone back in his pocket and Archie was still smiling and looking at him, making Jughead feel like something inside his chest was too big for his body, burning him up from the inside out. Like always. And then he’d broken eye contact, turning that blinding light away from Jughead and towards Veronica instead.
Once it had gotten late enough, they’d all split off into pairs, and that night, in her bedroom, Betty had said: There’s something I need to tell you. It’s about me and Archie. Jug, we—
Maybe the choice of photos is fitting, after all. The Archie he knows has been gone for much, much longer than three weeks.
Fully aware that it’ll only make him feel worse, Jughead starts scrolling through older posts. Archie was never very active on social media, but the bits Jughead can piece together make Archie’s post-high-school life seem much less eventful than Jughead had expected. There are a couple birthday messages, photos of family and friends that Archie has been tagged in, but that’s really it. What has he been doing for the past three years?
Jughead has the feeling he’s going to find out.
He doesn’t realize what time it is until his eyes are starting to burn, and he glances down at the clock in the bottom right corner of his laptop. 3:08 A.M. He runs a shaky hand through his hair and decides to give up the ghost – as it were – for tonight, and try to get a few hours of uneasy sleep.
He wakes up absurdly early, nonetheless. The sun is barely lighting up the still-grey sky, and the birds haven’t started chirping yet. He could go back to sleep, except now that he’s awake, the memories of the previous night start rushing in, making his entire body feel like it’s full of bees: the kind of nervous energy brought on by too little sleep and too much everything else.
The dining hall isn’t open yet, and he doesn’t have any work to do for the weekend, so without much preamble, he logs onto his computer and starts trawling through Archie’s social media again. He ends up scrolling through Betty and Veronica’s profiles, and even tries hunting around to see if he can find Kevin or Reggie or Munroe or anyone else from high school. The more profiles he finds without any mention of Archie, the more desperate he gets.
Five hours later, his eyes are burning again, and he still hasn’t found anything. Somehow, though, despite all the evidence – or, more accurately, the lack of any – Jughead is certain that Archie’s still alive. He has to be.
Whether the conviction is actually based in truth or just desperate hope, he’s not sure, but being best friends with Archie for ten or so years means that both of them developed a sort of intuition for how the other was feeling, even after three years without talking. Jughead thinks psychics are pretty much bullshit, at least for practical purposes, but he doesn’t know how else to explain the quiet conviction, deep within him, that Archie is out there somewhere. Still alive. Waiting for someone to find him.
Jughead spends the rest of the day aimlessly browsing the social media profiles of other people from Riverdale, and even scrolls through the backlog of articles on the Register’s website, looking for evidence of Archie. There’s virtually nothing. He wonders if everyone else in their grade had the same idea as him, to get the fuck out of Riverdale and sever ties with the whole town.
From what Jughead can tell, Archie never left. Jughead had never expected he would. Archie was one of the incredibly few people for whom Riverdale felt like home. Jughead had always planned to get out, one way or another, but maybe if things hadn’t gotten so fucked up in senior year, he would’ve come back to visit. Would’ve wanted to come back.
Well, he figures, looks like I couldn’t stay away forever. Not that he really wants to come back now, not exactly, but it’s his only choice if he wants to find Archie – dead or alive. He has to be alive.
Ultimately, Jughead gives up on the social media stalking, admitting to himself that it’s not exactly the most professional method of private investigation. As much as the idea scares him, if he wants to actually help in any way whatsoever, he needs to call Mary back.
He spends the next few hours psyching himself up for it (which involves a lot of pacing around the room and drinking a lot of coffee) and calls her that evening.
“Hello?” Mary’s voice sounds tinny through the phone, and it only makes everything feel stranger, more unfamiliar.
Jughead clears his throat. “Um. Hi, Mary.” He’s an adult now, he figures, so he should call her Mary, even though it doesn’t feel right. “It’s Jughead.”
“Oh, oh my goodness, hi. One second, I was in the middle of something—” Jughead can hear papers shuffling for a few seconds before Mary picks up the phone again. “Sorry about that. Thank you for calling me back, I wasn’t sure if you would – and I would understand why if not, of course, but I can’t tell you how much I appreciate hearing from you. How are you?” she asks, and Jughead feels very weird talking about his feelings to the mother of a missing kid.
“Uh, you know…I’m okay,” he replies. It doesn’t feel right to say good – and it’s not true, anyways – but he doesn’t want to put any more of a burden on her than what she’s already dealing with. “How are you?” It comes out stilted, awkward, and he winces once the words are out of his mouth. If it was weird for him to try to answer that question, what the hell is she supposed to say? “Good, except that my only remaining family member is missing and presumed dead”?
“I’m…I’m taking things day by day, I guess. I’ve been staying busy with this whole investigation thing, trying to keep my head above water, but…it’s hard.”
“Yeah,” Jughead replies quietly. Feeling like he should say something else, but at a loss for words, he adds: “I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
Mary takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Thank you. I know this must be…a lot for you, too. Especially after all this time. I know a voicemail isn’t exactly the best way to find out about this kind of thing.”
“If there is such thing as a best way,” Jughead adds dryly. “But, really, it’s okay. Thank you for calling me. If there’s anything I can do to help…” He trails off, hoping Mary will tell him what exactly she wants him to help with, because he has no fucking clue how to begin.
“Yes, absolutely.” She sounds more determined now, but still tired. “I haven’t exactly come up with any kind of plan – I wasn’t sure if I even had the right number, much less if I’d hear back from you. I tried to find your current number; I mean, I didn't just want to leave a voicemail like that on some random person’s phone. But no one in town had a more recent number for you – well, I'm sure you know. And I didn't find anything under your birth name – I take it you got yours changed?"
"Yeah," Jughead says, caught off-guard. "Gender marker, too." He wasn’t expecting to have the 'surprise-I-have-a-new-name-and-gender' conversation with Mary, but he realizes he's never actually had to have it with anyone before.
“That’s great. Archie did his, too. It was a few months after his – and your – senior year ended, I think. Did both of his at the same time. The DMV was a nightmare,” she adds, and her laughter catches Jughead off-guard; it’s so far from how he thought this call would go.
He makes a vague affirmative sort of noise, not exactly sure how to respond to that information. Hearing Archie’s name still feels like there’s a screw being drilled through his guts, even after all this time.
There's a second of silence before Mary asks: "So, what should I call you, then? I'm sorry if I used the wrong name in my voicemail – I’ve gotten so used to knowing you as Jughead, I didn’t even process that you might’ve changed that, too.”
"No, it's okay. Jughead is fine. That’s always felt more like my 'real' name, anyways."
“So, are you Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third, now?" Mary asks.
Jughead sucks in a breath through his teeth. "Yeah, no. I thought about it, but it never really felt like me. Plus, my dad...I didn't want his name. I don't think he even knows I changed it. He'd probably be mad I'm not carrying on the family legacy or whatever, but, I mean, what legacy is that, really? Alcoholism? Twenty-five-to-life sentences? No thanks."
Mary doesn't say anything, and Jughead realizes he shared a little more than he meant to. "Sorry, didn't mean to make that so depressing. But I believe in xenogenesis, so. I guess my name’s a reminder of that. That I don’t have to be like him.”
“I get it,” Mary says softly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay,” Jughead replies. “It’s actually kind of nice. I mean, I haven’t really talked to anyone about that aspect of it. I’m not really in touch with anyone from Riverdale, so no one knows enough to ask. Kinda got a blank slate when I moved away. New state, new name, everything.”
“Where – where are you now? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Uh, Massachusetts. Not too far away. I’m on a scholarship, that’s the only reason I can afford out-of-state tuition.” He laughs half-heartedly.
“Oh, that’s great. I used to work in Boston, I loved it there.” She clears her throat. “Look, I know this has to be…way too much to process all at once, so it’s okay if you need to take some time to think about it, but – the reason I called. Maybe getting a new perspective would help us find something, anything, about what happened to Archie. I’m really grasping at straws here, and I wouldn’t be asking you to come back to Riverdale if it wasn’t my last resort. I can’t imagine you’re eager to come back. But if you could – maybe come home just for a few days, just to take a look around the house and a few other places, read through the case files, that kind of thing. I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me just to get some kind of closure.”
Jughead exhales slowly. Home, he mouths. The word feels strange in his mouth, even stranger when he thinks about it referring to Riverdale.
“I’ll – I’ll think about it,” he replies. “I promise. I do want to help, even after…everything. Archie deserves it. You do, too. Can I call you back in a few days, once I’ve thought it over?”
“Sure, that’s okay. Thank you, again, Jughead. I really do appreciate it.”
“Thank you, too,” he replies, even though he’s not exactly sure what he’s thanking her for. It just feels right. “Bye.”
“Bye,” Mary says, and he hangs up the phone.
The rest of the week passes in a daze. Thankfully, he’s busy enough with work for his classes and picking up tutoring hours that he barely has enough time to think about Archie. Reminders of him and random memories still slip into his thoughts from time to time, and every time, they sting, but he manages to keep his shit together for a few days. Jughead doesn’t have class on Fridays, and the upcoming Friday is his birthday, so he intends to spend the day doing absolutely nothing. Maybe it’ll help him de-stress (although, at this point, that seems like an uphill battle).
He wakes up on Friday to an email notification from his dorm’s front desk, informing him that he’s received a letter.
Probably a birthday card, maybe from Toni and the other Serpents. They don’t talk much anymore, outside of the occasional life update and birthday or holiday letter, but he’s grateful that they’ve stayed in touch. He’s proud of all of them, too, for leaving Riverdale and doing something with their lives, just like they used to promise each other they would.
Jughead decides to get breakfast at the dining hall and heads by his building’s front desk on the way back to check his mailbox. Sure enough, there’s an envelope with his name on it. For some reason, it doesn’t have a return address.
“Thanks,” he calls out to the front desk attendant on his way out the door. He sits down on a bench outside and opens the letter carefully, sliding his finger under the lip of the envelope so he doesn’t rip it. Once he pulls out the single sheet of paper inside and unfolds it, he realizes that it’s completely blank. He flips it over just to double-check. Nothing.
He walks back into the building, letter in hand.
“Hi,” he says tentatively.
The desk attendant looks up from her laptop. “Hi, can I help you?”
“Yeah, uh. I just got this letter in my mailbox, but it’s blank. No return address, nothing. I’m just trying to figure out where it came from – did it come in with the regular mail?”
“Oh, uh…” The desk staffer – Keziah, her name tag says – twirls a strand of hair around her finger as she thinks. Betty used to do that, his brain offers. She releases the strand and it springs back into place.
“Actually, no, some guy came in asking where your mailbox was. I was here when he came in. He asked for you by name, but he didn’t say anything about what the letter was. Sorry, I wish I could be more helpful.”
“That’s okay, I appreciate it.” Jughead turns the letter over in his hands, running his thumb over the handwritten JUGHEAD JONES on the front. The handwriting looks…familiar. “Weird question, but, uh, what did he look like? The guy who brought it in.”
“Um, kinda tall, white, dark brown hair. I know that doesn’t really narrow it down much, but I don’t really remember anything else that stood out.”
Well, there goes his one guess – or, more accurately, his one hope.
“It’s all good. Thanks anyways,” he says, turning around to leave. Jughead gets halfway out the door, and then remembers that back in their junior year, when Archie was in Canada on the run from Hiram Lodge, he’d disguised himself by dyeing his hair brown. It can’t hurt to ask.
He walks back up to the desk. “Did you happen to notice if he had a scar between his eyebrows? Like, a little horizontal scar right here,” Jughead asks, pointing to the spot on his own face.
Keziah squints, trying to remember. “You know what? Actually, yeah. Right there.” She draws a line between her eyebrows.
It feels like someone’s thrown a bucket of cold water over him.
“Okay. Cool. Thank you,” Jughead says quickly, rushing out the door and back up the stairs to the north wing of the building, where he beelines to his room and closes the door behind himself.
That kind of scar can’t be that unique, except that he doesn’t know anyone else who has one, and whoever left the letter did it on his birthday. It can’t be a coincidence.
He takes the piece of paper out of the envelope again, turning it over and over in his hands like words will just magically appear if he does it long enough.
Ever since Mary called him, memories of his childhood have been flooding back in, and something about the blank letter – combined with his desperation – suddenly triggers memories of Archie and Betty’s (and his own) elementary school obsession with the Nancy Drew books. One day, they’d all followed one of the book’s instructions on how to make invisible ink using lemon juice.
He tells himself that nothing will happen, and very carefully does not get his hopes up, and then says fuck it and decides to try anyway. He holds the paper up over the lightbulb of his desk lamp, close enough that the paper starts to heat up.
“What the fuck,” Jughead whispers to himself as brown lines start to appear, gradually forming letters and words. It takes several minutes of patience until he can finally read the whole thing. Not that there’s very much to read.
Written in small, scribbled letters on the middle of the sheet are five words:
COME HOME.
I NEED YOU.