If you are reading this, then I am gone for good this time, and Marcus Ellison has done what I asked him to do, which is more than I ever deserved from a stranger and more than I ever managed to do for you.
I don't know how to start. I have started this letter forty times on forty different nights and thrown every draft away. The truth is I have been a coward for twenty-odd years, and cowards are bad at beginnings.
So I will begin with the only fact that matters.
I did not drown in the Chesapeake in August of 2001.
I let you think I did.
I let Mom think I did. I let Dad go to his grave in 2009 believing his younger son was fish food and river mud. I stood across the street from his funeral in a ball cap and sunglasses like a bad movie and watched you carry his casket and I did not step forward. That is the kind of man I have been.
You deserve the why, even if the why will not forgive me.
The night before I took the boat out, I was drunk on Miller Lite and worse decisions at a bar off Route 17. There was a girl I barely knew. There was an argument in the parking lot that wasn't mine until I made it mine. There was a man who shoved me, and I shoved back harder than I meant to, and he went down and hit his head on a concrete parking block. I thought he was dead. I ran. I left the girl shouting my name. I drove home in a panic and sat in Dad's Whaler in the dark and decided the only way out of the life I had just ruined was to erase myself from it.