I miss you both a lot, and while I’m enjoying my time here, I’ll be glad when I’m back too. I’m so proud of my girl. We’ll all get through this.

Love you, Daddy.

I wanted to go and confront my mother with the letter. Ask her how dare she keep something like that from me. That he didn’t just belong to her, and it wasn’t her choice whether I got to talk to him. How he had loved us both, and he was dead because she had pushed him away, and I fucking hated her for it.

I wanted to do all of that, but I wouldn’t. There would be no point to it. She was broken, almost past the point of mending, and all I’d be doing by hurting her would be making myself more like her. So I took a deep breath, gently folded up the note and put it in my shirt pocket, and then I opened the box.

The inside was unlined beyond whatever light varnish had been used on the wood itself, and as my father said, there was just a small rock sitting in there. It was very rough and porous, much like I would imagine rocks from some underwater volcano looking when you first brought them out into the air and the light. But part of why I thought that was because of the condition of the rock itself.

It was wet. It was visibly moist and sitting in a small pool of clear liquid like an ice cube plucked fresh from a drink. I involuntarily moved the box further away from my face as the realization of what I was seeing sunk in. How could it possibly be wet or even oily after all this time? Was it just a trick of the light?

I tilted the box and saw the liquid flow languidly in the direction of gravity before suddenly fading away. Within moments it looked as though all the moisture had evaporated. Tearing off a piece of the shipping box, I used it to experimentally poke the rock, moving it around the wooden box and looking for any sign of the liquid.

But there was nothing. It just looked like an old, dry rock now.

Deciding I had imagined it due to being upset, I closed the box and carried it with me back to my old childhood room where I had been sleeping. That night I told my mother that I was going to have to leave on Sunday. That I had spent as much time as I could spare.

****

The next morning I went down to the mailbox to get the mail and I noticed something strange on the mailbox door handle. It was greasy. I saw nothing on it, and aside from being slightly distasteful, I didn’t think much of it until I opened the door.

Sitting on top of the mail was a dead mockingbird.