Part 13
The package arrived on a Friday, three months after the email confirming Garrett’s death.
It wasn't large—just a standard cardboard box wrapped in heavy brown paper, sent from the administrative office of the state penitentiary. It required a signature. I stood on the porch, the delivery driver’s digital pen heavy in my hand, feeling a strange, hollow coldness pass through my fingers as I signed my name.
The driver didn't know what was in the box. He gave me a polite nod, walked back to his truck, and drove away, leaving me alone with the final remnants of a man who had haunted my nightmares for over a decade.
I didn't take the box inside. I carried it down to the beach, far past the view of the house windows where Violet was practicing her scales and Quincy was sketching blueprints on the kitchen table. I sat on a piece of smooth driftwood, the wind whipping my hair across my face, and used my pocketknife to slice through the tape.
Inside were the personal effects of an inmate who had died with no next of kin willing to claim him. Because our names had never been legally unlinked in the state's oldest database, the burden of his disposal had fallen to me.
There was a plastic digital watch with a cracked face. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses, one lens scratched heavily. A small, black-bound Bible with the spine broken, its pages yellowed and swollen from prison humidity. And a stack of letters, tied together with a thick rubber band that had begun to rot and stick to the paper.
I didn't want to look at them. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to dig a hole in the sand and bury the box deep enough that the tide would wash it away. But there was a quiet, stubborn need inside me for absolute certainty. I needed to know that there were no lingering threads left to pull us back into the dark.
I snapped the rubber band. It broke with a dry click.
The letters weren't written to me. They weren't written to the children. They were letters from lawyers, state appeals boards, and medical examiners. Garrett had spent his final years writing endless, desperate petitions for early release, citing his failing health, his deteriorating heart, and his claims of rehabilitation. On every single page, the bureaucratic red ink of the state had stamped the same word: DENIED.
He had died small. He had died begging a system that didn't care about his excuses, trapped in a room that smelled of floor wax and bleach, surrounded by people who only knew him as a number. The grand, terrifying monster of my youth had shrunk into a pathetic old man who couldn't even convince a judge to let him die outside of a wire fence.
At the bottom of the box was a single, sealed white envelope with my name written on it in his jagged, familiar handwriting.
My breath caught in my throat. The world around me seemed to tilt. For a second, the sound of the ocean disappeared, replaced by the memory of his heavy footsteps on the floorboards of our old house.
I held the envelope between my thumb and forefinger. I could feel the thickness of the paper inside. He had written a confession, or an apology, or a final, venomous curse meant to poison the peace we had fought so hard to achieve. He had wanted one last word. One last moment of control from beyond the grave.
I looked back up at the house.
Through the distant window, I could see Violet. She was standing by the piano, her bow arm moving with beautiful, perfect precision, her head tilted as she listened to the resonance of her own music. Quincy was walking out of the workshop, carrying a long piece of oak on his shoulder, his stride confident and steady. They were beautiful. They were whole. They didn't belong to the man who had written this letter. They belonged to the light.
I didn't tear the envelope open. I didn't read a single word.
I stood up, walked over to the old metal fire pit we used for beach cookouts, and dropped the entire box inside. I struck a single wooden match and dropped it onto the dry paper.
The fire caught quickly. The brown cardboard blacked and curled, and then the flames licked into the letters, turning his desperate appeals and his final, unread words into bright, orange sparks that rose up into the wind. The smoke was thick and bitter for a moment, but then the ocean breeze caught it, scattering the ash out over the vast, uncaring waves.
May you like
When the fire died down to nothing but gray dust, I felt nothing. No anger, no satisfaction, no sorrow. Just a clean, empty quiet.
The past didn't have a voice anymore. I had denied him his final audience. I turned my back on the fire pit and walked home, the sand shifting beneath my feet, ready to make dinner for the family that had outgrown the monster entirely.
