Then he read it a third time.
Then he sat in the dark after he switched off the light and let the fact of his brother's second life, and second death, settle into his bones like weather.
Sleep, when it came, was thin and crowded. He dreamed of water. He dreamed of a boat with no one in it. He dreamed of his father's funeral and a figure across the street in a ball cap who raised one hand, almost a wave, and then was gone between the parked cars. He woke at four with his heart hammering and the letter still on the table where he had left it, pale in the glow of the stove clock.
In the morning he called in sick to the accounting firm where he had worked for nineteen years. He drove to Richmond. He stood in the cemetery where their father's stone stood beside a smaller marker that read ANDREW MICHAEL GRANT, 1979–2001, BELOVED SON AND BROTHER, LOST TO THE BAY, FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS, and he told the granite the truth.
"You weren't lost," he said. "You left. And then you stayed gone. And then you died anyway, in a bed in West Virginia, with a truck driver holding your hand instead of me."
A crow watched him from a nearby oak. The morning sun was hard and clear. Thomas placed his palm flat on the marker and left it there until the stone warmed.
He thought of their mother, who had died five years earlier believing both of her losses were final — husband to cancer, younger son to the bay. She had kept Andrew's room unchanged for a decade before she finally boxed the trophies and the band posters and the half-finished model airplanes. Thomas had helped her. They had cried into the cardboard. If she had known — if she had lived long enough for Marcus to deliver the letter — would the knowledge have healed her or broken her twice? Thomas could not answer. He was grateful, in a complicated way, that she had been spared the choice.
"I'm still mad," he told his brother. "But I'm glad you didn't drown. Even if glad is a complicated word right now."