“It’s time to face facts, Jack,” the Sheriff began once the novelty of humoring a bereaved husband’s conspiracy theories wore off. Being a murder scene was fun for a while, but sooner or later, everyone wanted to get back to the rosy picture of small-town life Clarksville was so good at projecting—as long as you didn’t peel back the edges. “You’re the only one with a glaring motive here, and your alibi’s airtight. Now, unless your drinking buddies from down in the shaft have a change of heart and tell me you weren’t with them at Tab’s that Sunday night, I suggest you come to terms.”

“You saw that letter I found,” I gritted out. “Francesca was having an affair with some prick from Romania. You don’t think you should be looking for him?”

“We did look, Jack,” he said, rubbing his eyes like they were getting sore from seeing me so often. “Fact of the matter is, your wife came here when she was twenty and no one, including you, by your own admission, has a fucking clue as to who she was before then. Hell, for all you know, the guy who sent that letter is some old flame she left back in Romania who couldn’t get her out of his head.”

“The ‘guy who sent that letter’ killed her,” I seethed. “And he knew about her life here, with me. That’s something.”

“If we were sitting in the NYPD offices, maybe it would be,” he said, throwing his pen down on his desk. “Fact remains, we’re in Clarksville. Now, not a damn soul has mentioned seeing a stranger in town for the last year and if anyone had, they would’ve fessed up by now.”

“So start questioning them,” I demanded. “You’re the Sheriff, I shouldn’t have to do all the legwork.”

His eyes narrowed and he gave me that look he’d given me so often in high school. The look that said, “The only reason I’m not beating your ass right now is because I don’t want you to tell anyone about the shit we got up to that night when we were both drunk behind the bleachers.”

“Your ‘legwork’ already has you on thin ice, and my patience keeps getting thinner,” he said, lowering his voice. Like the deputy gave a shit. The guy was always high and at the moment, he was picking dirt out of his fingernails while he listened to some wingnut on satellite radio. “Thank your lucky stars that you’re home now and not sitting in state.”

“I would find that a lucky break, Ben, if I’d killed my wife and if the man who actually did wasn’t still out there,” I shot back.

Ben pinched the skin on his forehead just over his eyes together, digging his fingers in deep. I’d envied those blue eyes of his once, and he’d called mine the greenest he’d ever seen in a rare moment of poetic inspiration. In a time we both wanted to forget, he’d tangled his hands in my shaggy brown hair and over the years, I’d kept more of it than he had even if I had a few grays I owed to the joys of parenthood. We were both thirty-four, but his chalk white skin had wrinkled more than my tawny beige. The guys in the mine liked to joke that I was the only fucker who could keep a “tan” in the mines, and usually I just laughed because I was on the edge of the generation that had been cautioned to sweep our Melungeon heritage under the rug and the one that saw it as an identity to wear proudly.

“I don’t think you quite understand the situation, Jack,” he said in a way that suggested he was taking on the -ass in his head. Had to be tough, transitioning from the school bully who could get away with everything to the one job in town where you actually had to pretend like you gave a shit, with the possible exception of the mayor. “All you have to go off of is that letter. A letter Franny kept for God only knows how long, with zero information about the guy who sent it other than a first name that could just as well have been a synonym.”

“Pseudonym,” I corrected under my breath. 

His bushy eyebrows stuck together like two caterpillars having a war. “What?”

“Nothing. You could at least pretend like you give a shit about the fact that someone came here and killed a resident of your town.”

“I do care. I’ve spent the last seven goddamn months doing little other than caring,” he growled, slamming his palm down on the desk. “We got nothin’. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to accept the fact that Franny was mixed up in some fucked-up shit and you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

His words cracked like a whip against my flayed ego, but he was right. Of course he was right. 

I didn’t know Franny at all. That’s what I was grieving more than her death, and I didn’t know if it was because I was still in denial like Ellie’s therapist thought or because I was the kind of shitty husband who deserved to find that letter. I couldn’t tell if I was numb because I was in shock or because I’d always been that way and it just took this to make me see it.

“You need to be honest with yourself, Jack,” Ben said in a pitying tone that made me want to punch him even more than the sanctimony did. “This isn’t about finding the guy who killed Franny.”

“That so?” 

“For God’s sake, everyone in town could see your marriage was over before it started,” he scoffed. “You think going all Tarantino over her death makes up for the fact that your entire relationship was a sham?”

My fists clenched up and I had to remind myself that killing the sheriff when I had a fifteen-year-old who still needed someone to pay for her braces and someone at home when she got back from school was not even a thought I should be entertaining. 

“You can look at me like that all you want, but we both know it’s the truth,” he continued. “You’re hardly the first gay guy to knock up a one-night stand in high school, and I’ll give you credit for committing to the long con, but it’s gotta give at some point. See this as your chance to start over. I don’t make a habit of saying this to the primary suspect in a murder investigation, but get the company to transfer you, take Allen and get the hell out of this town before you both rot in it.”

“Ellie,” I gritted out for what I was sure was the ten-millionth time that week. Beverly “The Mattress” Holk could change her last name every other week to match her new husband’s, but when the one openly trans person in the history of Clarksville swapped a few letters out, no one could get it right. “Her name is Ellie.”

Ben gave me that other look. The tired, “I’m trying to be progressive, but you people just make it so damn hard,” look every halfway decent person in town gave me whenever I stood up for my daughter. The thing fathers were supposed to do. The same look Francesca had always given me when I corrected her and it was just the two of us. 

“All the more reason to start over somewhere new. Somewhere you can just be a mine supervisor and his teenage daughter. Hell, I hear Nashville’s got a rainbow scene that stretches from one end to the other. You’ll love it.”

I narrowed my eyes and the words on the tip of my tongue were probably going to get us chased out of town with pitchforks, but I let them slip anyway. “That where you go on all those ‘fishing trips’ you take to get away from Kay?”

All the humor drained from his expression. “Watch yourself, Jack. I’ve been patient with you up to a point, and you’re passing it faster the more you open your mouth.”

I pushed away from his desk. “My bad. I don’t know why I thought anyone in this town would actually be interested in doing their job,” I said, letting the door slam shut behind me. 

Some words only had meaning because they were the last a certain person ever said to you, whether you realized it in the moment or not. When Francesca told me, “I’m going to the store, text me a list if you need anything,” I assumed it was a lie because most of the words that came out of her mouth in the last year of our marriage were, but it didn’t mean much at the time. Only later, when I was surrounded by police and glaring through flashing ambulance lights, trying to hold our teenage daughter together when my whole world was falling apart, did it occur to me that that was the last thing she was ever going to say to me. The last time the dwindling European flavor of her voice would caress my ears. 

Our marriage had been hanging by a thread for years, and the fact that we should both outlive it seemed like a guarantee. Every day, I waited for the papers, the natural sequel to that letter I’d found in her sock drawer.

That was the thing about being a desperate person in a dying marriage. You did things you never thought you’d do, things you’d always judged other people for. Things like snooping through your spouse’s things looking for proof you didn’t want to find that they respected you as little as you feared. Things like keeping a lover’s letter nestled in your hosiery and taking it out to read and fold back so many times it took on the texture of thin cotton rather than paper. 

When the police had called that night and told me they’d found Franny’s body in the lake by Greg Klipp’s farm, the first thought on my mind should have been, This can’t be real. My wife’s not dead. It’s a trick.

Instead, it was, How the fuck am I supposed to tell Ellie?

She had just turned fifteen when it happened. Old enough to understand why the police were combing our house for evidence and looking at me like I was the primary suspect, not old enough that I wanted her to have any knowledge of that letter. Handing it over to the police in private had felt like a betrayal. The guilt was worse than the shame of providing proof to the men whose brothers I supervised in the coal mine, whose children went to school with mine, that my wife had a lover.

The suspicion in the sheriff’s eyes had been joined by pity that was now depleted the first time he’d read over those flowery words. 

Dragostea Mea,

You cannot run forever. How long will you live like a commoner in this little mountain town with an uneducated man who cannot satisfy you? 

You were mine from the beginning, but I will not claim you as is my right. Ours is eternity, and I am a patient man, if a possessive one. He may have you—until you grow weary of pretending to be what you are not.

But rest assured, my Francesca, I will have you beg on your knees before you return to me. You will bear my mark as you bear my soul. I wonder, has your country lover ever touched you so deeply?

Yours,

Nicolae

I knew what Ben was thinking. Either I was the one who’d slit Franny’s throat and dumped her body in the lake in a jealous rage after finding out about her latest lover, or it was the bastard who’d been railing her in secret for no telling how long. 

I knew handing over that letter would be motive the police needed to wrap up the only case of non-meth-related violent crime to darken the streets of Clarksville, Kentucky in the last thirty years. I also knew it would change the way everyone in town looked at me, but that was nothing new. Over the years, our little family had given the small minds plenty to talk about. At least this time the spotlight was on me and not Ellie. Poor kid had already been through enough shit.

Vengeance consumed me in those first few months, but as the investigation hit one dead end after another, the town gradually turned its focus to other gossip. Apparently even the sheriff wasn’t interested anymore.

Some days, it felt like a whole lifetime had passed since the night Franny had told me she was pregnant. I’d always remember the look on her face when she came out of my mom’s bathroom, clutching the white stick that spelled out the rest of our lives in two blue lines. Others, I realized that nothing had really changed. We’d all grown up on the outside, and swapped the clothes that had divided us so neatly into classes back in high school—the jocks, the preps, the losers—in exchange for uniforms that made the distinction even clearer, but we were all still the same. 

I’d taken the job with Big Mountain Coal because it was the only entry-level career where a high school dropout with a baby on the way could expect to earn a decent starting salary. At the time, it hadn’t mattered that I was selling my health when I signed that contract. Even if I had, it probably wouldn’t have changed my decision. The job was a double-edged sword. It took the same toll on my body that it had taken on my family’s land, the same toll the drugs had taken on my mother. Even now that we could easily afford a doctor, I found myself putting off those exams because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know just how bad the cough that had nagged me for the last five years really was. Nonetheless, the job was the only reason Ellie had grown up in comfort rather than the constant strain of poverty that had been the backdrop of my childhood.

Maybe Franny and I had never had a fairy tale romance, and our little home was far from a castle. Hell, there was more fighting than there was anything else, especially once Ellie had come to us about taking the first step toward her transition. I’d just always thought what we did have, what we’d both fought so hard to build, was enough. 

It was enough for me, anyway. Despite her cracks about me just being pissed I’d “gotten stuck with a woman” when we really got into it, I’d never once felt the need to be with anyone else, man or woman, while we were together. No matter how hard I’d tried to reassure her that she was enough for me, I could tell those doubts persisted. Now at least I knew it was projection. She was sure our marriage wasn’t enough to hold my interest, but that was only because it wasn’t enough for her.

Ben was right in his own bastard way. It was a chance to start over, and maybe I hated myself too much to take it on my own, but Ellie deserved better than always being a spectacle. Francesca had made me promise once, when we were first married, that no matter what happened, we would never leave Clarksville.

Well, she had promised to be faithful, and that was before our family had become the only subject anyone felt like talking about. I’d kept my promise to her for fifteen years, but maybe it was finally time to do something for myself and my daughter.

Maybe it was finally time to let go.