Gerald Marsh was my mother Susan’s older brother.
My uncle.
The man who had sat at every Christmas table, every birthday, every family gathering I could remember.
The man who had pressed fifty-dollar bills into my hand at graduations and called me his favorite niece and danced with me at my wedding.
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“Frank didn’t believe it either.
Not at first.”
“Gerald loved Frank.
They were close — they were friends long before Frank married Susan.”
“Yes,” Miriam said quietly.
“They were.”
Something in her tone made me go cold.
“Open the envelope, Claire.”
I opened it.
Frank’s handwriting covered four pages, front and back.
His letters were shakier than I remembered — the illness had already been in his hands when he wrote this — but the words were precise.
Deliberate.
The handwriting of a man who knew he was writing something that would outlast him.
