4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Cargo That Wouldn't Sink
The body floats face-down in crystalline water, arms moving with the current in a rhythm that mimics life but isn't. Luke's first thought is Jamie—that somehow, impossibly, he's lost the man he loves whilst busy manipulating everyone else. His second thought, when the face turns upward, is worse. He knows who this is. He knows what this means. And the river flows in only one direction: toward the person who must never find out.
Joel's body surfaces at the worst possible moment. Luke recognises the face immediately—Jamie's son, the boy they mourned with whiskey and candlelight, the secret Cody was supposed to have buried. Now that secret floats in the shallows, throat gaping, drifting toward a lagoon where Jamie has gone walking with Duke.
The argument is immediate. Glenda wants to bring the body in, perform an autopsy. Luke wants to let the river carry it away—anywhere but here, anywhere but toward Jamie. Paul sides with burial. The debate becomes academic when the body slips from Luke's hands and the current claims it.
Downstream. Where is Jamie?
Luke runs. Confesses to Paul mid-stride—He's Jamie's son—and watches thirty-four years of brotherhood reconfigure in his brother's eyes. They race the current together, trust fractured but necessity intact.
Nothing prepares them for what waits at the lagoon. The corpse that grabs Paul with impossible strength. Jamie discovering his murdered son somehow still breathing. The reckoning Luke spent days trying to prevent arriving anyway, in the worst possible way.
Some secrets don't stay buried. Some bodies don't stay dead.
