William Jacob Marshall

The Pool at Sunrise

William Jacob Marshall was born on 12th September 1989 at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, the fifth of six children born to Gregory Alan Marshall and Margaret Louise Marshall (née Jensen). His arrival expanded an already boisterous household in the Avenues neighbourhood, where the sounds of sibling negotiation, scripture reading, and the clatter of dinner plates for eight formed the constant soundtrack of daily life. Gregory, born on 2nd April 1955, had spent his twenties as a lifeguard and swim instructor at public pools across the Salt Lake Valley before settling into a career as an insurance adjuster — steadier work, he reasoned, for a man with a growing family, though he never entirely lost the chlorine-scented restlessness of someone who'd been happiest near water. Margaret, born on 19th August 1958, taught third grade at Wasatch Elementary for thirty-one years, her classroom a model of patient discipline and quiet encouragement that her own children experienced at home before they ever encountered it professionally.

The Marshall household operated according to the rhythms of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with a thoroughness that left little room for ambiguity. Family scripture study before breakfast, Family Home Evening every Monday, church services consuming the better part of Sunday, seminary for the older children before school — these were not suggestions but the architecture of Marshall life. Gregory approached faith with the practical conviction of a man who had found in the Church the structure his own chaotic childhood had lacked. Margaret's devotion was warmer, more intuitive, expressed through the casseroles she prepared for struggling ward members and the quiet prayers she offered over each child's head at bedtime.

Will's five siblings shaped the household's character in distinct ways. David Alan, born on 11th January 1982, was the eldest and the family's standard-bearer — a serious boy who became a serious man, eventually practising corporate law in Denver. Michael James, born on 22nd June 1984, possessed an easy charm and mechanical aptitude that led him into aviation maintenance, his quick wit the family's most reliable pressure valve during tense moments. Rachel Ann, born on 5th March 1986, was the only daughter, a paediatric nurse whose organisational instincts and fierce protectiveness made her something between a second mother and a commanding officer to her younger brothers. After Will came Eric Daniel, born on 9th November 1992, analytical and introverted, happiest with a chessboard or a book of code. And Jared Nathan, born on 15th May 1995, the youngest, whose boundless energy and appetite for mischief ensured that the Marshall house never achieved the quiet Gregory occasionally craved.

Swimming entered Will's life not as choice but as inheritance. Gregory had taught all six children to swim almost before they could walk, treating water competence as a survival skill rather than a leisure activity. But it was Will who took to the discipline with an intensity that surprised even his father. From the age of five, Gregory would wake him before dawn and drive to the municipal pool, where they trained together in the grey half-light while Salt Lake City slept. The routine was punishing — two hours before school, another hour after — but Will never complained, because complaining would have meant acknowledging that some part of him resented the regimen, and Will had not yet learned to separate what he wanted from what was expected of him.

By the time he enrolled at West High School, Will was one of the most promising young swimmers in the state. He specialised in freestyle events, his tall frame and long reach giving him natural advantage in the hundred and two-hundred metre distances. He won state championships as a sophomore and junior, his name appearing in the local sports pages with the kind of regularity that made Gregory quietly proud and Margaret quietly anxious. She worried about the hours, the physical toll, the narrowness of a life organised entirely around a pool and a clock. But she packed his bags, prepared his meals, and attended every meet, because supporting her children's pursuits was as non-negotiable for Margaret as church attendance was for Gregory.

The Current and the Shore

Will graduated from West High School in June 2007, his academic record solid if unremarkable outside of mathematics and computer science, his swimming achievements the more visible legacy of his secondary years. The question of what came next was, in the Marshall family, not really a question at all. David had served his mission in Chile, Michael in Canada, Rachel had completed her own service before nursing school. Will would serve too.

He received his mission call in the spring of 2008 and departed that September for the Philippines Cebu Mission. The assignment placed him about as far from Salt Lake City as geography allowed — a landscape of tropical humidity, concrete churches, and a brand of poverty he had never encountered in Utah's comfortable suburbs. Will served competently. He learned passable Cebuano, taught discussions with earnest sincerity, and fulfilled his obligations with the same quiet discipline he brought to the pool. His mission president described him in final reports as reliable, consistent, and unlikely to cause problems — praise that said as much about the limitations of the assessment as about the man being assessed.

What the mission did, more than anything, was interrupt the momentum that had carried Will from his father's pool to the state championship podium. Two years without competitive training meant the body he returned with in September 2010 was not the body that had left. He was twenty-one, out of competitive rhythm, and facing the reality that the swimming career he'd imagined — collegiate scholarships, perhaps national-level competition — had been quietly foreclosed by the mission he'd never considered not serving. It was his first encounter with the particular cost of obedience: the things you lose by doing what you're supposed to do.

Rather than return to Utah, Will enrolled at Brigham Young University–Hawaii in January 2011, drawn by the prospect of warm water and year-round training even as he understood, privately, that competitive swimming had moved beyond him. He joined the university's swim programme as a walk-on, training with dedication that coaches admired but which never quite recaptured the explosive speed of his high school years. The gap between what he had been and what he now was — a competent swimmer rather than an exceptional one — taught Will something about himself that he would spend years trying to unlearn: that excellence, once interrupted, doesn't always resume.

He majored in computer science, discovering in programming the same satisfaction that swimming had once provided — the clarity of a problem with a definitive solution, the patient debugging that resembled the repetitive refinement of stroke technique, the quiet thrill of something finally working after hours of effort. His professors noted a student who was methodical rather than inspired, who arrived at correct answers through persistence rather than intuition, and who produced consistently high-quality work without ever quite catching fire.

It was during his third year, in the autumn of 2013, that he met Lisa Victoria Smith at a campus activity hosted by the university's student events committee. She was in her second year, studying business management with a specialisation in event planning, and she possessed a warmth and social confidence that Will found simultaneously attractive and slightly terrifying. Where he was contained and deliberate, she was expansive and instinctive. Where he preferred small groups and careful conversation, she lit up rooms simply by entering them. Their courtship developed through study sessions that became dinners that became long walks along Laie Beach, conversations about faith and family and future that revealed unexpected compatibilities beneath their surface differences.

Lisa saw in Will's quiet intensity a steadiness she trusted. Will saw in Lisa's warmth a capacity for emotional connection he admired but couldn't replicate. By their third year together they were engaged, the proposal offered with characteristic restraint — no elaborate staging, no public spectacle, just a question asked on a trail overlooking the North Shore, a ring that had belonged to Margaret, and Lisa's immediate, unhesitating yes.

Salt Lake and Sawdust

Will graduated from BYU–Hawaii in December 2014, returning to Salt Lake City to begin his career whilst Lisa completed her final year. He joined Nexus Logic Solutions, a technology firm in the city's growing tech corridor, as a junior software engineer. The work suited his temperament — building database architectures and optimising user interfaces required the same methodical patience that had defined his approach to swimming and study. His colleagues found him competent, reliable, and somewhat difficult to know. He attended team lunches without enthusiasm, contributed to meetings without volunteering opinions, and produced code that was clean, functional, and devoid of the elegant shortcuts that distinguished brilliant programmers from merely good ones.

Lisa Victoria Smith became Lisa Victoria Marshall on 18th June 2016, in a ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple that united her Australian family — who had flown in for the occasion — with the substantial Marshall clan. The wedding was elegant without ostentation, planned largely by Lisa herself, whose professional instincts were already sharpening into the skills that would define her career. Will stood at the altar with the composed bearing of a man who had prepared for this moment the way he prepared for everything: thoroughly, quietly, and with a private terror that adequate preparation might not be enough.

They settled into married life in a rented apartment in Sugar House, later purchasing a modest bungalow on a tree-lined street in the Avenues, not far from the house where Will had grown up. The neighbourhood suited them — close enough to Gregory and Margaret for Sunday dinners, walkable to trails that fed into the foothills, established without being expensive. They adopted a Golden Retriever named Ruby, whose enthusiastic disobedience became a source of shared comedy in a household that might otherwise have settled too quickly into routine.

Lisa's event planning career flourished. She started at a mid-sized firm and within two years had built a client roster that included corporate retreats and charity galas, her Australian directness and genuine warmth distinguishing her in a city where professional networks often ran through church connections. Will advanced at Nexus Logic, promoted to mid-level engineer and then to a team lead position overseeing cloud-based inventory management tools. Their evenings followed comfortable patterns — Lisa cooking something ambitious from a new recipe, Will at his workbench in the garage, shaping wood with the same careful precision he brought to code.

Woodworking had begun as a university hobby and grown into something closer to necessity. Will built bookshelves, side tables, a dining set whose joints were so precise that Lisa ran her fingers over them in genuine amazement. The craft gave him what swimming once had — a physical practice requiring discipline, patience, and the willingness to start again when a cut went wrong. The sawdust that accumulated on his clothes became as characteristic as the chlorine scent had been in his youth, and Lisa would later say that the smell of freshly planed timber was what she associated most strongly with their marriage.

Yet beneath the surface of domestic contentment, something had begun to shift in Will that he couldn't name and didn't want to examine. His faith, which had carried him through mission service and temple marriage without serious disruption, had started to feel less like conviction and more like habit. He attended sacrament meeting because it was Sunday and that was what Sundays were for. He fulfilled his callings because declining would require explanations he didn't want to give. He read scripture because Margaret asked whether he was keeping up, and disappointing his mother remained more uncomfortable than the increasingly hollow exercise of devotional reading. The erosion was gradual — not a crisis of faith but a slow recession, like a tide going out so imperceptibly that you only notice when you look up and find the water surprisingly far away.

Lisa sensed the distance without understanding its source. Their conversations about children — which had once been eager and optimistic — became evasive on Will's side, his vague deflections interpreted by Lisa as uncertainty about timing rather than something deeper. Their assumptions about the future, once so easily aligned, began to reveal divergences neither quite acknowledged. Lisa wanted a family, wanted to build something multigenerational and rooted. Will wanted... he wasn't sure what he wanted, which was itself the problem, because a man raised in a culture that provided clear answers to every question had discovered he no longer trusted the answers, and had nothing to replace them with.

The Ankle

On 1st August 2018, Will set out with Lisa and her brother Eli on a hiking trip through Zion National Park. The expedition had been planned for weeks, a rare convergence of schedules that Lisa had orchestrated with her professional precision. Will was looking forward to it — the park's red rock canyons offered the kind of stark, ancient beauty that quieted the noise in his head, and hiking with Lisa reminded him of the early days of their courtship, when every shared trail had felt like discovery.

He twisted his ankle badly on the first day, a misstep on uneven ground that ended his participation. Lisa and Eli continued alone whilst Will limped back to the trailhead and drove to the nearest town, where he spent three days icing his ankle in a motel room, watching cable television, and trying not to feel like a metaphor for his own limitations.

It was during those days of enforced stillness that the phone calls began. Noah Smith had been trying to reach Lisa — the messages were urgent and strange. Will fielded what he could, growing more uneasy with each call that went to voicemail. By the time Lisa and Eli emerged from Zion on 4th August, sunburned and elated, Will was carrying news he didn't fully understand and couldn't adequately deliver.

The weeks that followed dismantled everything. The revelation that Lisa's family — Noah, Greta, Jerome, Charles — had crossed through a dimensional Portal into a world called Clivilius arrived as a series of increasingly impossible facts that Will's methodical mind could not process. A Portal. Another dimension. A settlement called Bixbus. Guardians who could traverse between worlds. Lisa's brother Luke at the centre of it all. The evidence was undeniable — the family had vanished, and the explanation, however impossible, was the only one that fit.

Lisa wanted to go. Of course she wanted to go — her parents were there, her brothers, the family whose bonds had always been stronger than any other attachment in her life. Will understood this with the part of his brain that processed facts and accepted logical conclusions. But understanding and accepting are different muscles, and Will could not make the second one work. His career was in Salt Lake City. His parents were in Salt Lake City. His siblings, his home, the workshop in the garage, Ruby waiting at the door each evening — all of it was here, on Earth, in the life he had built through years of steady, methodical effort. The idea of abandoning everything for a world that shouldn't exist, that he couldn't verify or control or prepare for, triggered something in Will that went deeper than reluctance. It was the same paralysis he'd felt as a young swimmer standing on the blocks before a race he knew he would lose — the knowledge that forward motion was required and the absolute inability to initiate it.

He begged Lisa to stay. The conversations stretched through sleepless nights, tears and silences and arguments that circled the same impossible impasse. He offered compromises that weren't compromises — waiting, gathering more information, finding another way. Lisa listened with the patience of someone who had already made her decision and was waiting for him to recognise it. Their parting, when it came in September 2018, was tender rather than bitter. They held each other in the living room of the house they had chosen together, Ruby pressing her nose against their legs, and said goodbye with the mutual recognition that each was choosing their own form of loyalty and their own form of loss.

The One Who Stayed

The house on the Avenues felt enormous after Lisa left. Will had not anticipated how much space one person's absence could create — not just the physical vacancy of her belongings, which she'd left largely behind, but the silence where her voice had been, the stillness where her movement had been, the particular emptiness of a kitchen designed for two being used by one. Ruby, confused by the change, took to sleeping on Lisa's side of the bed, her warm weight both comfort and accusation.

Will threw himself into work with the desperate energy of a man who understood that stopping would mean feeling. Nexus Logic promoted him to lead developer in early 2019, a role that demanded longer hours and greater responsibility — exactly what he needed, because the alternative was an empty evening in an empty house with nothing but the sound of his own thoughts for company. He led a team developing healthcare software, his methodical precision finding purpose in systems where errors carried real consequences. His colleagues, who had always found him competent but remote, noticed a new intensity in his work without understanding its source.

The woodworking continued. In the garage workshop, surrounded by the smell of cedar and pine, Will built things. A rocking chair for Rachel's first child. A chess table for Eric. A set of floating shelves for the living room that Lisa would never see. The custom bookshelf he'd built during their marriage remained against the study wall, its proportions too perfect to discard, its associations too painful to look at directly. He worked with the radio on, filling the garage with voices that required nothing from him, and found in the rhythm of plane and chisel a kind of meditation that his scripture study no longer provided.

His faith, already receding before Lisa's departure, withdrew further in the aftermath. He attended church sporadically through 2019, then stopped almost entirely by 2020. Margaret noticed and said nothing, which was worse than confrontation — her silence carried the weight of a disappointment too large for words. Gregory, more direct, asked once whether Will was "keeping up with his covenants," received a non-answer, and didn't ask again. His siblings responded variously: David with concern, Rachel with practical attempts to reconnect him to the ward, Jared with the simple gift of showing up on Saturday mornings with coffee — technically against the Word of Wisdom, a transgression Will accepted without comment.

Jared, in fact, became Will's closest companion in the years following Lisa's departure. The youngest Marshall, now in his mid-twenties and working in outdoor recreation, dragged his brother on hiking trips, camping weekends, and eventually longer journeys — a road trip through the Pacific Northwest in 2020, a week in Costa Rica in 2021. These trips revived something in Will that had gone dormant. He would never be Jared's kind of adventurer — impulsive, heedless, delighted by discomfort — but he discovered that movement helped, that new landscapes interrupted the circling of his thoughts.

Ruby aged alongside him, her golden muzzle greying, her enthusiasm for walks diminishing into dignified appreciation for shorter routes. She remained his most reliable companion — present without demands, loyal without conditions, content with the simple exchange of proximity. Their evening walks through the Avenues became the fixed point around which Will's days organised themselves, the one routine he never missed regardless of work pressure or weather.