I didn’t have flowers. I didn’t have a plan or a eulogy prepared. I just needed to see the marker. A carved stone. Proof that he had existed, and undeniable proof that he was gone.
I walked toward the small, brick office building near the entrance, intending to ask the clerk for the plot number, but a voice stopped me before I got far.
“Hey.”
I turned, my shoulders tense.
An older man stood near a green maintenance shed, leaning heavily on a wooden rake. He wore a faded canvas jacket over overalls and thick, dirt-stained work gloves. His posture was casual, but his pale blue eyes were sharply alert, as calculating as a hawk’s.
He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t exuding customer-service friendliness. He was watchful, studying me like he’d seen grief turn into violent trouble too many times before.
“You looking for someone?” he asked, his voice gravelly, like tires on a dirt road.
“My father,” I said, the words feeling incredibly heavy on my tongue. “Thomas Vance. I need to find his grave.”
The man studied me for a long, agonizing moment, his gaze sweeping over my worn prison-issue clothes and the pathetic plastic bag still clutched in my fist. He seemed to be weighing something invisible in the air between us.
Then he shook his head—once, a slow, deliberate movement.
“Don’t bother looking,” he said quietly.
My heart plummeted, a cold stone dropping into my gut. “What do you mean don’t look?”
“Because he’s not here.”
I stared at the groundskeeper, my confusion rapidly sharpening into something dangerous.
“That’s not possible,” I snapped, taking a step toward him. “My stepmother literally just told me he was buried.”
“I know what Linda said.” The man’s voice stayed low, conspiratorial, entirely unfazed by my aggression. “But I’m telling you, the man is not in this dirt.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The old man sighed, a rattling sound that carried the immense weight of decades. He propped the rake against the aluminum siding of the shed and pulled off his right glove.
“Name’s Harold,” he said. “I’m the head groundskeeper. Been working this yard for twenty-three years. I knew your dad, Eli. Good man. Quiet man.”
Before I could ask how he knew my name, Harold reached deep into the inner pocket of his canvas jacket and pulled out a small, thick manila envelope. The edges were worn and fuzzy with age, like it had been handled daily, rotated in a pocket waiting for a specific moment.
He held it out to me.
“He told me to give you this,” Harold said, his eyes locking onto mine. “If you ever came asking.”
My hands went entirely numb. The massive cemetery, the brooding pines, the distant sound of traffic—it all narrowed down to that single, worn envelope.
read more in next page
