My business partner poured 420 pounds of quick-setting concrete directly into the engine bay and cargo bed of my delivery truck because he claimed it "blocked his view of the lake harbor" from our...
A long time later.
The autumn sun hung low over the vast blue expanse of Lake Michigan, casting long golden light across the stone embankment of the park. The city hummed quietly behind us, a constant, distant murmur.
I sat on a wooden bench, wrapped in a thick dark coat, watching the distant cargo ships move slowly across the horizon. Their passage left faint ripples on the water, quickly smoothed away.
Maya sat beside me. She was grown now, a quiet, brilliant woman. She had her brother’s steady brown eyes and her mother’s gentle posture. She reached over and rested her hand over mine, a silent gesture of comfort that needed no words.
We didn’t talk about Gerald Ellison. We hadn’t said his name in decades. His financial ruin had happened naturally, far away from us, leaving him a ghost in his own life, unremarked upon, unremembered.
We only thought about Elijah—the boy who had worked so hard, who had loved his family so fiercely, and whose laugh still seemed to linger, sometimes, in the cold lake wind, just at the edge of hearing.
The water was calm, reflecting the cold blue sky. The world had moved on, wars had ended, new eras begun, but the space where my son should have been remained empty forever.
The lake looks peaceful under the autumn sun, but no amount of quiet water can ever wash away the weight of what we buried.
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