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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/lets-split-up on 2024-11-10 20:13:01+00:00.

Every year, we have this cabin trip, and every year, each of us writes a secret and puts it in the hat. After dinner we dump all the secrets out and start guessing whose is whose. It’s a fun activity that always teaches us new surprises about each other. Whoever guesses the most secrets correctly wins a basket. What the basket contains is different every year—everyone donates a gift.

This year, for example, my wife donated a box of fancy chocolates, “So that Kim stops eating yours,” she joked to me.

Dan often was the winner. A jovial extrovert, he was the glue that kept our friendships together long after college.

Melody won the basket nearly as often. An analytical thinker, she kept samples of our handwriting, and she usually spent quite a bit of time analyzing the slips of paper to try to ascertain who wrote which secret.

Then there was Zuri, who always made sure the basket had a bottle of (very) expensive wine. She didn’t even drink herself, but she liked the rest of us to have a good time. She was a terrible guesser.

Kim was our resident joker, always donating something silly to the basket, like “the world’s spiciest chip” or a giant gummi bear. He won the basket only once before.

Steve was the blandest guy imaginable, and usually donated something boring—bath products or pistachios or coffee. He never really got our in-jokes or quite fit in with the group.

Our tradition’s been going on strong ten years now. We’ve always had a good time. And that’s why what happened makes no sense at all.

My wife dropped me off at the cabin on a Friday evening. Kim, Steve, Dan, and Melody arrived, each putting slips in the hat. Zuri couldn’t make it this year but wine came with a note for us to enjoy ourselves.

After dinner, we pulled the slips out of the hat. Five slips of paper with our five secrets that read:

I have a secret crush on someone.

I spent fifty-two cents on the prize I bought for the basket. :)

I have a star named after me.

It’s a girl!

I’m going to murder one of you.

We read them all aloud, laughing and shouting guesses until we got to the last one. Everyone went quiet. Someone wondered if it was a joke—we all looked at resident joker Kim, but he said his was the fifty-two cents one. Everyone began snatching their slips, until each of us was holding a slip except me.

“It’s Mia!” They all said. “Mia’s planning a murder!”

“No I’m not!” I sputtered. “I wrote ‘I started a new diet’!”

Who had swapped my secret for the murder one?

To say that tensions were high would be an understatement. In the end, Dan suggested we skip the game and share the basket. But everyone’s mood was sour except for Kim, who happily ate all the chocolates and drank half the wine bottle himself. I wondered if he really did put that murder slip in there as a prank, just so we’d wind up splitting the basket and he’d get a share.

But the next morning, we woke up and found Kim lying blue-faced and wide-eyed in the bed, vomit staining the pillow and sheets beside him.

And suddenly we were all screaming, panicking, wondering which of us had done it. We hurled accusations while waiting for police.

“The wine,” said Dan. “He was obviously poisoned. It must’ve been the wine!”

“Maybe it was the chocolates,” said Melody.

“But they weren’t even out of the plastic wrapping!” I said.

“It was the wine,” Dan insisted. “Think about it. One of us wrote that incriminating secret, right? But Zuri’s got an alibi because she’s not here. The police look for someone involved in the game. And she gets away with murder in the perfect crime.”

“Okay, but how does she get the slip of paper into the hat if she was never here?” said Melody.

We reviewed the secrets again. Steve had a secret crush, Dan’s wife was having a little girl, Melody had a star named after her (“You know those are scams, right?” I told her). Mine was still missing.

That’s how all suspicion suddenly turned on me. When police arrived, everyone was interviewed. I was the prime suspect, even after I told police someone swapped out my secret slip about a new diet before we drew them from the hat. I even searched the trash cans and recycling but couldn’t find mine to prove my innocence. The remaining papers were turned over to check for fingerprints. The authorities took the wine bottle and what was left of the chocolate box too.

My friends all thought I was a killer. I knew one of them was.

Later that evening, when I was finally back home and still wondering who had lied, the dog was whining to go out, so I grabbed a coat and took him out. And suddenly everything clicked horrifyingly into place. We had all been right. Dan was right about the perfect alibi. Melody was right about the chocolates—not the ones in plastic wrap in the basket, but the ones in my bag that were supposed to be mine, that Kim stole like he did every year. And I had been right that my slip of paper had been switched.

Fear coursed through me as I pulled a crumpled slip of paper from the pocket: I started a new diet

I’d put on my wife’s coat by mistake.