"He was both," he said. "Most people are. He made a very big mistake when he was young, and then he made another mistake by running from the first one, and he spent a long time being sorry. Your dad helped him at the end. That makes your dad part of the good."
Ava considered this. She was eight, and eight is old enough to understand that answers are sometimes shaped like that — not clean, not simple, but true.
"Okay," she said. And then: "Can we get hot chocolate after?"
"We can get hot chocolate after."
She grinned and returned to the leaves with the solemn dedication of a person who has filed away a piece of the adult world and found it survivable.
Later that same Saturday, after Ava had gone home with chocolate on her upper lip and leaves in her sneakers, Thomas stood in his garage and found the box he had not opened since his mother's house was sold. Inside were Andrew's high school yearbooks, a cracked leather wallet, a stack of letters Thomas had written to the brother he believed was dead and had never mailed — letters composed on birthdays and Christmases and the night after their father's funeral, addressed to nowhere, stamped with grief. He read one of them standing under the garage's bare bulb.
Andy — Dad's gone. I kept looking for you in the church. Ridiculous. I know. But I looked anyway. If you're somewhere, be somewhere kinder than this. —T
He had never mailed it because there was no address for the drowned. Now he knew there had been an address — a boarding house, a diner, a hospital bed in Beckley — and the knowledge that his words might have reached a living brother and had not was a fresh bruise on top of the old one. He put the unmailed letters back in the box. He did not burn them. He did not mail them to a grave. He simply let them exist as evidence that love, even misdirected, leaves a paper trail.