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When Thomas finished reading, the room was very quiet.
Ava had fallen asleep against Monique's side, her bare feet tucked beneath her, her mouth slightly open. Monique was crying again, but silently now — tears tracking down her face without sound, as if sound itself had been used up. Thomas sat with the pages in his lap and felt something vast and cold move through the center of his chest, a glacier calving, a door long bolted finally giving way.
"He was alive," Thomas said. His voice sounded strange to him, scraped raw. "All that time. He was alive."
Monique nodded. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "Marcus never said a word. Not one. He came home from those West Virginia runs quieter than usual, and I thought it was the job. The hours. I thought—" She stopped. Looked down at her sleeping daughter. "I thought a lot of things that weren't true."
"When did Andrew die?" Thomas asked. "For real."
"Marcus went to a funeral in Beckley in April of last year," Monique said. "He told me it was an old trucking friend. He wore his dark suit. He came home and sat on this sofa for a long time without taking off his shoes. Two months later he had the heart attack." Her mouth trembled. "He was going to give you that letter, Thomas. I believe that. I have to believe that. He was waiting for the right moment, or waiting until he was brave enough, and then he ran out of moments."
Thomas looked at the pages again. At the bird-wing T of his own name on the envelope. At the looping script that had once filled the margins of his high school notebooks with jokes and insults and the occasional borrowed dollar IOU.