Four years passed. In time, to their neighbors and friends, it appeared as if the couple had reached an equilibrium. In truth, they’d become their own private Montserrat, blown apart, existing in ashes. LeFleur shut the door to Lilly’s room. He hadn’t entered it since. He grew withdrawn, and shook his head whenever Patrice wanted to talk about what happened.

Patrice found solace in her faith. She went to church often. She prayed every day. She spoke of Lilly “being with God” and nodded tearfully when her friends said Lilly was in a better place and never had to worry again.

LeFleur could not accept that. He disavowed God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, anything he’d been taught as a kid in church. No merciful god would take his child that way. No Heaven needed his daughter so badly that, at four years old, she had to drown. Faith? What idiocy, he thought. The world to LeFleur became dark and irrational. He drank more. He smoked more. Few things mattered to him. Even the yellow house and the four-poster bed seemed stale. The power of misery is its long shadow. It darkens everything within view.

But this orange raft and its hidden notebook? They were a jolt to that misery. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the idea that something—even a few pages of something—had endured a tragedy and crossed an ocean to find him. It had survived. And witnessing survival can make us believe in our own.

He carefully separated the front cover from the first page. He saw dense writing. On the inside flap, there was a message scribbled in blue ink.

To whoever finds this—

There is no one left. Forgive me my sins.

I love you, Annabelle DeChapl—

The rest was ripped away.

Sea

Our eighth day in the raft, Annabelle. Blisters have formed on my lips and shoulders, and my face is itchy with a budding beard. I obsess about food all the time now. It enters my every thought. Already I feel my flesh stretched tighter over my bones. Without food, the body eats its fat, then its muscle. In time, it will come for my brain.