Chapter 7 - The Anonymous Letter
Four months into Eric’s prison sentence, an unmarked white envelope arrived in our mailbox.
It had no return address, only a faint prison mail processing stamp from the Huntsville correctional facility. Inside was a single sheet of lined notebook paper, covered in messy, blue-ballpoint handwriting.
It wasn't a letter from Eric. It was from his cellmate.
To Marcus Miller,
Your brother talks a lot in his sleep. He talks about you, he talks about your wife, and he talks about the money he hid before the cops picked him up. He thinks he’s getting out in three years and going back for it. He hid three thousand dollars in cash behind the loose baseboard in your garage, behind the old lawnmower.
He doesn't know I'm writing this. I've got two daughters of my own, and I saw what he was convicted for. A guy who leaves a baby and a sick woman on the floor doesn't deserve a nickel.
Do what you want with it.
I stood in the driveway holding the letter, the cold winter wind whipping against my jacket.
I didn't tell Clara right away. I walked straight into the garage, pulled away the old rusted lawnmower I hadn't used since the summer, and dropped onto my knees near the wooden baseboard along the back wall.
I pulled out a flathead screwdriver from my toolbox, jammed it into the seam, and pried the board forward.
With a soft crack, the wood gave way.
Inside the dark gap, wrapped in a thick plastic sandwich bag, was a stack of hundred-dollar bills—thirty bills in total, secured with a rubber band.
It was the rest of the stolen money from his sports betting run—the money he had intended to use to escape state lines before he got caught in our kitchen.
I picked up the plastic bag, stood up, and looked at the cold bills in my hand.
I didn't feel triumph. I felt a profound, chilling disgust at the sheer extent of his calculation. He had hidden cash in my own garage while sleeping on my couch, eating my food, and smiling at my wife.
I walked into the house, set the plastic bag on the kitchen counter, and showed the letter to Clara.
She read it silently, her face calm, unbothered by the sudden ghost from the past.
"What are we going to do with it?" she asked softly.
"We're not keeping a single cent of it," I said.
May you like
An hour later, I drove down to the local women's shelter—the same facility that had provided victim advocacy services for Clara during the preliminary hearing—and handed the entire three thousand dollars over to the director as an anonymous donation for their emergency childcare fund.
When I walked back out into the bright winter afternoon, the air felt lighter, cleaner, as if the last microscopic speck of Eric's toxicity had been scrubbed from our lives.
