He'd left me a letter, and I couldn't make myself open it. It sat on my bedside table like a hungry animal patiently waiting for me to get careless, and I couldn't bring myself to throw it away or read it either. Just having it near me was its own kind of ache.
I honestly don't remember the exact words Hans used to finally get me to open it, but it was something close to, "Quit whining and read the damn thing already, or I will read it out loud to the whole farm."
He can be a real charmer when the moment calls for it. I'm fairly sure Abigail put him up to it. She's always known me better than I know myself.
Sympathy was never going to work on me, and she knew that better than anyone.
The letter went something like this:
My dearest Jon,
You've been more of a son to me than your own father ever managed to be, and I'm sorry to have left you before you were ready for it. I'm sorry for all the pain that's coming with this letter.
I wish I could have been a better stand-in for the father you didn't get to keep close. You've carried more weight on your shoulders than any boy your age should have to, and I'm sorry for that too.
Please learn from the shape of my life and do the opposite of it wherever you can.
I sometimes regret not doing more. Not seeing more of what's out there. If I'm honest, I envy your mother more than I've ever admitted to you: she chased her ambitions with her whole chest, and your father, for all his faults, never once settled for the life that was simply handed to him.
They're better teachers than I ever was, if you want to know how to actually live.
I taught you how to farm and how to hunt, but I never once set foot beyond Hallowmere. I read you a hundred stories about Corvin Ashe the sword king, but I never saw the inside of a single dungeon myself.
I see the way you look at Abigail, and I know you don't have the nerve to say it to her face. I didn't have the nerve to ask your grandmother out either. She had to ask me.
And waking up next to her every morning after that made me the happiest man alive, right up until the end.
Real loss is loving something more than you love yourself. I hope you find something worth that kind of loss, and that you go after it while you still can.
You'll get knocked down. Everyone does. It was never about how hard you hit back.
It's about how hard you can take a hit and still keep your feet moving forward.
Your world is only as big as Hallowmere right now. Go make it bigger.
Love,
Harry Marrow.
I folded that letter and put it in the inside pocket of my traveling coat before I understood I'd even decided to leave, and it stayed there for a long, long time after.
I cried over that letter more than once before I could look at it straight, and every time I re-read it, the same thought kept surfacing: his dying wish for me was that I not turn out the way he had. In my mind, though, he was the finest man I'd ever known. How exactly was I supposed to become better than the best person I knew?
Maybe, I decided, the answer started with going to find my father and getting some real answers out of him. But before I could leave Hallowmere, there was someone I needed to talk to first. Something I needed to finally say out loud.
I found her in the kitchen, of course. Abigail was always in the kitchen when something in her needed sorting out.
"I packed you food and water for the road," she said.
Her mouth said the words evenly enough, but the rest of her face disagreed with every syllable. Her hair was scraped back into the tightest bun I had ever seen on her, tight enough that I half expected to hear it snap.
"How did you already know I was leaving?"
I asked. I had only just decided, minutes before, and somehow she'd beaten me to the packing.
"Your mother left.
Your father left. Your grandfather spent his whole life wishing he had left.
Your family seems to have a real talent for leaving people behind," she said, and for a second I thought I saw her fighting back tears of her own.
I think she read the letter before I did. I never asked, and she never offered.
"I know you miss them.
I promise I'm coming back.
I just need answers," I said, trying to soften something that didn't really have a soft side.
Truthfully, I was terrified out of my mind at the idea of leaving Hallowmere for anywhere else, and some cowardly part of me was hoping she'd talk me out of it.
"What do you actually know about me?"
she asked. It landed like a trap I could already feel closing. I'd spent years quietly cataloguing every detail of her I could get away with noticing.
"A lot more than you think," I said.
"You hate roasted pheasant because it reminds you of something from before you got here.
You bite your hair when you're nervous, so you wear it up too tight on purpose to stop yourself. You could tell me every idea I've ever had is stupid, and half of them are, but you don't, because you're a genuinely good person underneath all that scowling. That's also why you go hard on me when I'm upset instead of coddling me, because you already worked out it lands better.
And yes, I know you told Hans to yell at me until I opened that letter."
"Why are you telling me all this?"
she said. A moment earlier she'd been on the edge of crying. Now even her dark skin had gone a shade lighter around the cheeks.
I decided to press whatever small advantage I still had before she recovered enough to hit me.