Page 111 of Everything You Hate
The box has been on No Name for a hundred years. It survived the storm that took Abel and nearly took Dean. It survived the storm that sank Evangeline’s journal to the bottom of the sound where no one will ever read it again.
I need to see if it’s still there. I don’t entirely know why. Dean doesn’t ask me to explain it, which is one of the four hundred reasons I’ve fallen in love with him.
We go out on a clear morning ten days later, the water finally calm, the sky the washed-out blue of a Pacific spring. Dean takes the No Name out himself, easy at the helm, and I stand beside him with my shoulder against his arm. Doug rides in the cockpit zipped into a canine life jacket the color of a traffic cone, deeply affronted by it, and Captain sways on a perch Dean rigged in the companionway, keeping up a running commentary at the gulls.
As we clear the breakwater and Gull Shit Rock comes up on the bow—two acres of granite and bent evergreen, ugly and small and mean—Captain sidles down his perch, considers the open water, and screams, “Abort! Abort! Abort!”
“He’s not wrong,” Dean says. “Last time we came out here it didn’t go great.”
“Last time you fucked me in a storm.”
“Like I said. Didn’t go great.” But he’s fighting a smile, and he takes us in toward the east cove with the tide with us this time, timed right, no drama.
The climb up to the fissure is easier in good weather, though Dean still keeps a hand at my back on the slick stretches and lets go slower than he strictly needs to. Doug, we leave in thecockpit, where he stands with his front paws on the gunwale, supervising, betrayed. Captain rides up on Dean’s shoulder like a small green pirate and mutters the whole way.
The chamber is exactly as we left it. Twelve feet deep, cold, still, smelling of wet stone and time. My flashlight finds the carvings on the left wall—the crosses, the circles, the dates. 1887. 1889. 1891. I picture someone standing here, year after year, cutting proof of themselves into rock nobody was meant to find.
Thomas. It had to be Thomas.
And on the shelf, wedged where it’s been since before either of our families started lying about why they hate each other: the cedar box.
I lift it off the shelf. It’s lighter than it looks, and it holds together in my hands, salt-grayed and solid. Whatever’s inside doesn’t shift.
“Not here,” I say. “I don’t want to open it in the dark.”
Dean nods and takes it from me while I climb, cradling it against his chest with one arm the whole way down like it’s something that could still be hurt.
Doug loses his entire mind when we drop back into the cockpit—wheeling, snorting, slamming his ridiculous body against both our legs, outraged and overjoyed in equal measure that we dared to leave him. I go down on the deck and let him climb half into my lap before Dean sets the box between us on the cockpit sole.
The morning is bright and flat. The water slaps lightly against the hull. Captain hops down from Dean’s shoulder to the coaming and cocks his head at the box.
The hinges have rusted to lace. They don’t so much open as surrender, flaking apart under my thumbs, and the lid lifts with a sound like a held breath let go.
Inside: oilcloth, gone dark and brittle. And folded within it, water-stained, foxed brown at every edge, a single sheet ofpaper covered in handwriting I would know anywhere. I’ve spent months with it. The long formal loops. The hard downstroke on the capitals.
Evangeline.
Most of it is gone. A hundred years of damp in a sea cave has eaten the ink to ghosts, whole lines dissolved to a brown wash, the paper so soft in places I don’t dare touch it.
The date is 1904.
I read it three times to be sure. Eleven years after she vanished. Eleven years after the story both families have told for a century says she was gone, she wrote this letter.
My dearest Thomas…
She was alive in 1904.
“Scarlett.” Dean’s voice is quiet. “What does it say?”
My eyes are wet, and I blink past the tears. “That she lived.”
He looks at the paper a long time. Then at me. He doesn’t ask the next question—so where did she go, so what happened—and I love him for that too, because those are exactly the questions the old me would already be chasing with a camera and a thesis and a headline.
The old me would have this documented six ways before we left the water. Photographed, color-corrected, a forensic paper expert on retainer by Tuesday, the story—the missing heiress lived, exclusive—half-written before we made the breakwater. It would be the biggest thing I’ve ever put my name on. It would prove the feud is built on a lie. It would remake my whole career in a single stroke.
Evangeline ran for her life and stayed hidden on purpose, letting the world believe her dead because being dead was the only way she got to stay free.
She spent a century making sure no one would find her.
