Eric Daniel Marshall

The Chessboard in the Corner

Eric Daniel Marshall was born on 9th November 1992 at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, the fifth of six children born to Gregory Alan Marshall and Margaret Louise Marshall (née Jensen). He arrived into a household that was, by any reasonable measure, already full — four children ranging in age from three to ten, a father whose emotional register ran from silent approval to silent disapproval, and a mother whose patience had been tested by a decade of expanding logistics. Eric's contribution to the family's atmosphere was, from the outset, a quality that none of his siblings possessed in comparable measure: stillness.

Where the Marshall home in the Avenues neighbourhood was characterised by the controlled chaos of a large family — David's debating practice audible through the study door, Michael taking apart small appliances in the garage, Rachel marshalling younger siblings like a drill sergeant at a birthday party, Will's five o'clock alarm for swim training — Eric occupied the margins. He was the child you found in the corner of the living room with a chessboard, working through problems from a book of openings that Gregory had bought at a charity shop and nobody else had touched. He was three years old when Jared arrived, and he regarded the screaming new addition to the household with what Margaret later described, laughing, as the expression of a man whose concentration had been interrupted at a critical moment.

Gregory Alan Marshall, born on 2nd April 1955, had spent his twenties as a lifeguard and swim instructor before transitioning into a career as an insurance adjuster — steadier work, he reasoned, for a man with a growing family. He approached fatherhood with the same methodical discipline he brought to risk assessment: expectations were established, performance was monitored, and deviations were noted. Margaret, born on 19th August 1958, had taught third grade at Wasatch Elementary for the better part of three decades, and she carried the particular exhaustion and warmth of a woman who had spent her entire adult life managing small humans, both professionally and domestically. Together they raised their six children within the architecture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — scripture study before breakfast, Family Home Evening on Mondays, church on Sundays — and Eric navigated this structure with a fluency that none of his siblings quite matched. He didn't resist it like Jared. He didn't endure it like Will. He simply operated within it, the way a chess player operates within the rules of the game: not because the rules inspired passion, but because understanding them was the first step to performing well.

His siblings shaped his childhood by contrast. David Alan, born on 11th January 1982, was the eldest and the family's standard-bearer, already oriented toward law by the time Eric was old enough to notice. Michael James, born on 22nd June 1984, possessed an easy mechanical charm that made him the sibling everyone sought out for practical help and emotional relief. Rachel Ann, born on 5th March 1986, was the family's organiser — fierce, protective, and occasionally exhausting in her certainty about how things should be done. William Jacob, born on 12th September 1989, was the swimmer, quiet and disciplined and living a life structured around a pool and a clock. And then Jared Nathan, born on 15th May 1995, the youngest, whose boundless energy and cheerful disregard for structure made him Eric's temperamental opposite and, in some ways, his most instructive mirror.

Eric was not close to any of them in the way that the word usually implies. He loved his siblings with a loyalty that was genuine and unwavering, but intimacy required a kind of emotional spontaneity that didn't come naturally to him. He showed affection through acts of quiet usefulness — fixing Rachel's spreadsheet for a school fundraiser, explaining Michael's tax return, helping Margaret alphabetise her classroom library every August. These were not grand gestures. They were the currency of a boy who had learned early that being indispensable was safer than being vulnerable.

Numbers and Knowing

Jared attended Wasatch Elementary alongside his mother's daily commute, but for Eric, three years earlier, the arrangement had been more straightforward. He entered the school in 1998, a quiet six-year-old whose teachers quickly identified his aptitude for mathematics and pattern recognition. Where other children his age were learning to add single digits, Eric was working through double-digit multiplication with the untroubled competence of someone for whom numbers behaved predictably, which was more than he could say for people. His reading was strong, his writing adequate, and his social skills functional without being warm. Teachers used words like "mature" and "self-contained," which were polite ways of saying that Eric didn't play much at recess.

Bryant Middle School, which he entered in 2004, sharpened the pattern. Eric discovered economics through a classroom simulation that required students to manage a fictional business, and the experience crystallised something that had been forming since the chessboard in the living room: a fascination with systems. Not just numbers in isolation, but the way numbers described behaviour — how incentives shaped decisions, how markets allocated resources, how risk could be quantified and, within certain parameters, controlled. His teachers noted a student who asked questions that belonged in a university seminar and who finished his assignments before the rest of the class had parsed the instructions.

At West High School, which he attended from 2006, Eric found his people — or the closest approximation available to a teenager whose idea of recreation was reading business case studies. He joined the Business and Finance Club, competed in investment simulations that pitted student portfolios against one another, and discovered in the abstractions of market theory the same satisfaction that Will found in swimming and Jared would later find in woodworking: a discipline where effort produced measurable results and ambiguity could be resolved through better data. He participated in mathematics competitions with consistent distinction, his scores more a function of thoroughness than brilliance — he rarely produced the elegant shortcut, but he never made a careless error.

His social life was narrow by choice. He had a small circle of friends, mostly drawn from the same clubs, with whom he discussed interest rates and coding logic with the enthusiasm that other boys reserved for football. Girls found him polite and slightly baffling. He attended school dances because Rachel insisted, standing near the refreshment table with the posture of someone conducting field research on human behaviour.

He graduated from West High in the spring of 2010, his academic record distinguished in mathematics, economics, and computer science, unremarkable in everything else. Gregory approved. Margaret worried, though she couldn't have articulated what about — Eric was, by every visible measure, exactly the kind of son a parent should want. He was disciplined, ambitious, respectful of authority, and entirely clear about his plans. The worry was vaguer than that. It lived somewhere in the space between who Eric presented to the world and the question of whether there was anything behind the presentation that he hadn't yet chosen to show.

The District of the South

The mission was never in question. David had served in Chile, Michael in Canada, Rachel had completed her own service, Will had departed for the Philippines. Eric submitted his papers in the summer of 2010 with the same methodical preparation he brought to everything else — application completed ahead of schedule, medical clearance obtained without delay, personal statement drafted, revised, and redrafted until it met his own exacting standard. He received his call to the Argentina Buenos Aires North Mission that autumn and departed in October.

Argentina disassembled Eric in ways that spreadsheets couldn't prepare him for. The mission field demanded not just obedience and structure — which Eric could provide in his sleep — but emotional availability, cultural flexibility, and the capacity to connect with strangers on the basis of something more than competence. In the crowded neighbourhoods of Greater Buenos Aires, where the air smelled of grilled meat and diesel and the conversations moved at a velocity that left his seminary Spanish gasping, Eric encountered a world that didn't operate on logic. Families invited him into homes where the furniture was broken and the hospitality was overwhelming. Children treated him as a curiosity. Adults asked questions about faith that he could answer doctrinally but not personally, and the gap between those two capacities troubled him more than he expected.

He became fluent in Spanish within his first year — his ear for pattern and structure translating efficiently into language acquisition — and was appointed district leader in his second, overseeing younger missionaries with a quiet authority that his mission president described as "reliably competent." The assessment was accurate and incomplete in equal measure. Eric managed schedules, resolved logistics, and ensured that reports were filed on time, because these were things that could be managed. The harder work — the emotional labour of ministering to people whose lives bore no resemblance to his own, the vulnerability of testifying about a faith he had inherited rather than chosen — he performed adequately without ever quite catching fire.

What the mission gave him, beyond fluency and a line on his résumé, was a glimpse of his own limitations. He returned to Salt Lake City in October 2012 knowing that he was exceptionally good at systems and merely adequate at people. This was not, in itself, a crisis. But it was the first data point in a pattern he would spend the next decade slowly recognising.

The Long Game

Eric enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo in January 2013, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a double emphasis in Finance and Economics. The campus suited him — structured, faith-adjacent without being suffocating, populated by students whose ambitions aligned with his own. He attacked his coursework with the systematic intensity of a man who had spent two years longing for an environment where effort translated directly into grades. His professors noted a student who was thorough, precise, and almost pathologically well-prepared, whose written analyses were models of clarity and whose class contributions were infrequent but invariably correct.

He secured internships at financial firms during his second and third summers — the first at a small advisory practice in Salt Lake City, the second at a regional investment bank in Denver — and both confirmed what he already suspected: that his talent was for analysis rather than salesmanship, for the architecture of financial models rather than the theatre of client relationships. He liked the quiet intensity of spreadsheet work, the satisfying click of a formula resolving correctly, the way a well-constructed model could translate the chaos of a market into something legible. It was chess at scale.

Eric graduated in April 2016 with honours and returned to Salt Lake City, joining a financial consulting firm called Ridgeline Capital Partners as a junior analyst. The work was demanding and precisely suited to his temperament: assessing risk for corporate clients, developing economic forecasts, building the quantitative foundations upon which investment decisions were made. He was good at it. His colleagues found him competent, meticulous, and somewhat difficult to read — a description that would have been equally valid at any point in his life since the age of six.

His family life during these years followed a comfortable orbit. He attended Sunday dinners at the Avenues house, sitting across from whichever siblings were in town, contributing to conversation with the measured precision of someone who had opinions about everything and shared them only when the moment was efficient. Will's marriage to Lisa in June 2016 was an occasion Eric observed with genuine warmth and his characteristic restraint — he gave a toast at the reception that was short, funny, and surprisingly tender, surprising nobody more than himself. Jared's refusal to serve a mission in 2013 had registered with Eric as a piece of information he filed without comment. He understood the decision better than he let on, and his silence — which Jared later recalled as ambiguous — was not indifference but a recognition that any response he could formulate would be inadequate to the situation. Eric Marshall knew how to process data. He did not always know how to process people.

He met Jessica Marie Carter at a financial services networking event in November 2018, three months after Lisa's departure had detonated Will's life. Jessica, born in 1993, worked as a financial analyst at a competing firm, and their courtship unfolded with the kind of efficiency that would have mortified a romantic but suited both of them perfectly. They discussed investment strategies on their first date, economic policy on their second, and the pragmatics of long-term partnership on their third. Neither mistook this for a lack of feeling. They were simply two people for whom clarity was its own form of intimacy, and who found in each other's directness a relief from the exhausting ambiguity of more conventional courtship. Jessica was sharp, self-possessed, and entirely comfortable with Eric's emotional reserve, largely because her own register operated in a similar key.

Reasonable Returns

Eric Daniel Marshall and Jessica Marie Carter were married on 14th August 2021 in a ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple that was elegant in its restraint — no unnecessary flourishes, no lengthy speeches, no elaborate centrepieces. The guest list was curated with the same discipline Eric brought to his investment models: family, close friends, a handful of professional contacts whose presence felt appropriate rather than obligatory. Gregory, now retired, watched his fifth child marry with an expression that combined satisfaction and something rarer — the recognition that Eric had built exactly the life Gregory had always envisioned for his sons, and the faint, unexamined question of whether that should have been the measure all along.

They settled in a modern townhouse in the Millcreek neighbourhood, a twenty-minute drive from both their offices, chosen for its proximity to the freeway and the hiking trails that Eric used for the brisk, scheduled walks that constituted his primary form of exercise. The house was tidy and minimally decorated, its shelves organised by subject and then alphabetically, its kitchen equipped with exactly the tools required and nothing more. The chess table that Will had built — a beautiful piece of walnut with a board inlaid in maple and ebony — occupied a corner of the living room, and it was the only object in the house that seemed to carry weight beyond its function. Eric played against himself most evenings, working through grandmaster games from books, the click of pieces against wood the only sound in a house whose quiet he found not oppressive but restoring.

His career advanced with the steady predictability he valued. Ridgeline Capital promoted him to senior analyst in 2020 and then to associate partner in 2023, his portfolio of corporate clients expanding as his reputation for thorough, conservative analysis grew. He was not the firm's most dynamic figure — that distinction belonged to colleagues who could charm a boardroom and close a deal over cocktails — but he was its most reliable, and in financial consulting, reliability was worth more than charisma over the long term. He specialised in risk assessment for mid-sized enterprises, a niche that rewarded precisely the qualities he possessed in abundance: patience, precision, and an almost preternatural ability to see the thing that could go wrong before it went wrong.

Their son, Ethan Carter Marshall, was born on 22nd March 2023, arriving with a set of lungs that reminded Gregory, who visited the hospital that evening, of Jared's entrance thirty years earlier. Eric approached fatherhood the way he approached everything: with preparation, with seriousness, and with a determination to do it correctly that occasionally obscured the simpler imperative to do it warmly. Jessica, whose own temperament was no less analytical, provided balance not through contrast but through shared understanding — they were two people building a system for raising a child, and if the system occasionally prioritised efficiency over spontaneity, it also produced a household that was stable, consistent, and suffused with a love that expressed itself through structure rather than spectacle.

Margaret adored Ethan with the uncomplicated joy of a grandmother who had waited for each grandchild with equal impatience, and her visits to Millcreek — armed with picture books and the same songs she had sung in her third-grade classroom for thirty-one years — drew from Eric a softness that few people outside his immediate family ever witnessed. He would watch his mother read to his son and feel something that his analytical mind could identify as gratitude but which was, in truth, closer to wonder: the recognition that the woman who had raised six children whilst teaching a full classroom had done so without spreadsheets or strategic plans, and that her approach had worked at least as well as his own.

The Clivilius revelation — Lisa's departure, Will's unravelling, the impossible fact of a dimensional portal — had disrupted Eric's model of reality in a way he processed privately and completely. He did not deny it, because the evidence was irrefutable. He did not dramatise it, because drama served no analytical purpose. He simply absorbed the information, recalibrated his understanding of what the world apparently contained, and turned his attention to the practical question of what could be done for Will. His answer was characteristically Eric: he reviewed Will's finances, ensured his insurance coverage was adequate for a single-income household, and sent a bottle of good Scotch — another quiet transgression against the Word of Wisdom that he never discussed with his parents and that said more about his own evolving relationship with faith than any conversation might have.

Jared, who had become Will's closest companion in the years after Lisa's departure, sometimes brought Eric along on shorter hikes, and the three brothers formed an unlikely triangle: Jared the wanderer, Will the wounded, Eric the observer. Eric contributed little to these outings in terms of conversation or emotional availability, but his presence carried its own message — the quiet solidarity of a man who might not know how to comfort his brothers but would never leave them uncomforted for lack of trying.