By morning the radio said the man was in critical condition, not dead. By afternoon they said he would live. By then I was already past the mouth of the bay, and the story I had told myself — that I was a killer fleeing justice — had become something harder to undo: a disappearance. I scuttled the boat near a spit of marsh I knew from childhood, swam to shore with a backpack and the cash from my dresser, and hitchhiked west until Virginia was a rumor behind me.
I became David Merrick in a boarding house in Beckley, West Virginia. I washed dishes. I fixed roofs. I drank. I did not write. I did not call. Every year that passed made the return more impossible, because how do you walk back into a kitchen and say, Surprise, the drowned boy is only a coward?
Marcus found me in 2019.
He was running long-haul routes through the mountains then, before he took the local job that brought you all to Laurel Court. He stopped at the diner where I was cooking nights. He was kind in the particular way some men are kind — without performance, without needing an audience. We talked about nothing for months. Then one night after close I was more drunk than usual and I told him my real name. I told him about the boat. I told him about you.
He did not call the police. He did not call you. He sat with me until dawn and then he said, When you're ready to write your brother, I will carry the letter myself.
I was never ready.
I got sick last winter. Liver. The kind of sentence you earn one bottle at a time. Marcus drove to Beckley on his weekends. He sat in the plastic chair by my bed and read me the sports page because the silence was worse. In March I finally wrote this. I gave it to him sealed and I made him promise two things: that he would not open it, and that he would put it in your hands only after I was gone.
If you are reading this, he kept the first promise. I am trusting him with the second.