The seventh and eighth leaves of Deren’s packet were personal. But they contained none of the soothing promises that fathers wrote when they expected to come home before the first snow. Deren had known with total exact clarity that he was going to die in the dark rock shafts of the Star tower. He had written with the brutal, unsparing honesty of a clerk closing an insolvent firm.
Tell your sister that I should have told her about the mortgage before I took the road, he wrote, the ink growing darker and heavier where his dipping pen had dug into the soft pulp of the voucher. I told myself I was sparing her worry. That was a coward’s excuse. Hiding danger from the people who share your house is not kindness. It’s vanity. You convince yourself that your shoulders are broad enough to carry two loads, and then you drop both in the ditch and leave your family to pay for the broken freight.
Len stared at the words until the grain of the yellow paper seemed to vibrate against his eyes.
Every sentence read like an indictment of his own conduct over the past six days. He had accepted the Survey Office commission at the northern depot. Then, he had told Cira it was an ordinary parcel haul. He hadn’t told her that he was carrying an open sixth milestone in his ledger. He had hidden the flaring progression band beneath his shirt, convincing himself that he could slip…
