Ethan nodded. “Me too,” he said softly. “Even showers. Sometimes.”
I glanced at him. “Because of Thomas?”
“Because of Marcus,” Ethan corrected. “Because if someone can push you into a lake and call it an accident, then anything feels possible.”
I swallowed hard. “Not anymore,” I said.
Ethan stared at the water, then asked, “Were you and Thomas close?”
The question stung because the answer wasn’t simple.
“We were,” I said slowly. “And then we weren’t. His mother died when he was twenty. After that, he got… private. He didn’t want my help. He didn’t want my concern. He wanted space, and I didn’t know how to give it without feeling like I was abandoning him.”
Ethan’s gaze stayed on the lake. “So you fought.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “We fought about money, about school, about his choice to marry Vanessa. He thought I was judging him. I thought I was protecting him. And we both got stubborn.”
I exhaled. “Our last conversation wasn’t kind,” I said. “We weren’t screaming, but… we weren’t gentle either.”
Ethan’s voice was small. “Did you tell him you loved him?”
I closed my eyes. “Not in that conversation,” I whispered.
The regret hit like a wave even after years. Because death doesn’t only steal someone. It steals the chance to fix the last sharp edges between you.
Ethan’s hand brushed my sleeve, awkward but sincere. “He knew,” he said. “He wrote to you. He left you the coordinates. He trusted you.”
I swallowed hard, looking away so Ethan wouldn’t see the tears.
In December, Ethan applied to university.
He’d always wanted to study law, he said, but he’d drifted through community college before his mother died, unsure, half asleep inside his own life. Now he was awake. Angry. Focused.
“I want to do what he tried to do,” Ethan told me one night at the kitchen table. “Expose what people hide. Help the ones who get crushed.”
I nodded slowly. “It’s a hard road,” I warned.
Ethan’s mouth tightened. “So is grief,” he replied. “At least this road goes somewhere.”
He was accepted into a program in Toronto with financial aid and a scholarship fund created in the wake of the Hartford corruption case—money redirected from seized assets and settlements.
The idea made me grimly satisfied.
Thomas’s life couldn’t be returned. But his truth was funding someone else’s fight.
Before Ethan moved, we went through Thomas’s belongings together. Not everything. Not all at once. But little pieces: a hockey jersey, old photos, the battered compass Thomas carried on camping trips.
Ethan picked up the compass and turned it over in his hands.
“He liked being north,” Ethan murmured.
“He did,” I said. “He said the wilderness made him feel honest.”
Ethan nodded slowly. “Maybe that’s why he met my mom there,” he whispered.
There were days Ethan’s presence made grief sharper. Seeing Thomas in his face felt like reopening a wound. But there were other days when Ethan’s laugh—so similar to Thomas’s when it slipped out unexpectedly—felt like air returning to a room that had been sealed.
The first time Ethan called me Dad without thinking, we were in the garage. I’d dropped a wrench, and Ethan handed it to me with a small grin.
“Here, Dad—” he began, then froze, eyes widening. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
I stared at him.
The word Dad had belonged to Thomas for so long, I’d thought hearing it again might break me.
Instead, something in my chest loosened.
“It’s okay,” I said quietly. “You can say it if you want.”
Ethan’s eyes filled. “I don’t want to replace him,” he whispered.
“You can’t,” I said. “But you can belong.”
Ethan nodded, breathing hard, then whispered, “Okay.”
On the night before he left for Toronto, Ethan stood in Thomas’s old room upstairs, suitcase zipped, textbooks stacked on the bed like he was trying to build a future with weight and structure.
He looked around the room, then turned to me. “Do you think he’d be proud?” he asked.
I swallowed hard. “Thomas would be furious you had to do this without him,” I said. “But yes. He’d be proud.”
Ethan nodded slowly.
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the USB drive he’d carried the night he arrived at my porch.
“I don’t need this anymore,” he said quietly.
I took it, feeling the strange symbolism of it: Thomas’s voice, Thomas’s warning, Thomas’s truth.
“Keep backups,” I said softly.
Ethan managed a small smile. “Always,” he replied.
That night, after Ethan went to bed, I sat in my study alone. The grandfather clock ticked. The phone sat on my desk.
For the first time in years, the thought of 3:47 a.m. didn’t feel like a curse.
It felt like the moment the truth found its way home.
Part 8
The first winter after Ethan moved to Toronto, the house felt both emptier and less haunted.
Thomas’s room was no longer preserved as a shrine. It had purpose again—Ethan’s textbooks, his laundry basket, a cheap desk lamp that stayed on too late. Sometimes I’d walk past and hear Ethan on the phone with classmates, debating case law with the intensity of someone who’d learned what happens when the system looks away.
It didn’t erase grief.
But it changed the shape of the silence.
On the anniversary of Thomas’s disappearance, Ethan came home. He didn’t announce it dramatically. He just showed up with a backpack and tired eyes and hugged me a little too tightly at the door.
“Hey, Dad,” he said quietly.
I still felt the ache every time, but now it came with warmth too, like pain and love had finally stopped pretending they were opposites.
We drove to Lake Superior that morning.
The sky was low and gray, the water dark and endless. The lake looked the same as it did in my nightmares. Vast. Indifferent. Capable of swallowing anything.
We stood on the shore with a small wooden box Ethan carried, his hands steady.