After that, her spirit waned. She would watch television with the sound off. Sometimes she went days without eating. She never spoke of the plant accident, or what happened with my father, but it was understood that her grand plan for a better life had tried and failed, and that failure hung in the air of the tiny kitchen where we ate our meals, and in our dull-green bathroom, and in the peeling paint and faded carpet of our bedrooms. Sometimes, when we went for walks, with me pushing her in a wheelchair, my mother would cry for no reason; when someone passed with a dog, or when kids were playing baseball. I often felt she stared at things but saw something else. Broken people do that.

My mother’s most repeated advice to me was this: “Find one person you can trust in your life.” She had been mine for my turbulent childhood, and I tried to be hers in the years she had left. After she died, I felt heavy all the time. My breathing was labored, my posture stooped. I worried that I was ill. I realize now this was merely the weight of love that had nowhere to go.

So I carried that love, searching the world for a place to lay it down, but never found anywhere or anyone until I found you. I have been a poor man in many ways, Annabelle. Perhaps, upon reflection, even an unlucky one. But I was lucky in the most important way. That night after the fireworks, you told me your name and I told you mine. And you looked at me with your eyes wide open and you said, “Benjamin Kierney, would you like to take me out one day?” I was so overwhelmed, I couldn’t answer. I think that amused you. You got up, smiling, and said, “Well, maybe one day you will.”

The rest of my life seems inconsequential after that—where I worked, what neighborhood I lived in, what I thought about certain things. There was you, Annabelle. Only you. I am near the end of this page and realize I can sum up my life before I reach the bottom.

I am thirty-seven years on this Earth, and I have been a fool for most of them. In the end, I failed you, as I always feared I would.

I am sorry for everything.

Land

LeFleur chugged the remainder of his coffee and killed the engine on his jeep. The morning was cloudless and the forecast was for hot, steamy weather.

As he carried his briefcase to the front door of the station, he was already thinking of what hours he could carve out to continue reading the notebook. He had barely begun when Patrice interrupted him. But he’d read enough to know something strange had happened on that life raft, when they discovered a man floating in the sea: