Marco tossed his car keys on his kitchen island, and as he did, he noticed a thick white envelope. His assistant always neatly organized his mail in his study, systematized into fan mail, work, bills, and personal. The white envelope on the island had only one thing written on it: Marco. Marco immediately recognized Jake's sloppy, third grader handwriting, and all at once his stomach was filled with an icy ball of lead.

Some of the fear came from the fact that if Jake had ever written him a letter, it'd been so long that he'd forgotten. Some of it came from the guilty knowledge that it had been months since he'd bothered to check on Jake.

Most of it came from the realization that if Jake had taken the time to write him a letter and break into his house to leave it for him, it sure as hell wasn't just to talk about the weather.

He took the envelope to his recliner, but set it on the end table without opening it. A part of him must have known it for what it was, but his conscious mind rejected it. Rejected it with a screaming, hysterical fervor that was very un-Marco-like. 'He wouldn't. He wouldn't dare. He wouldn't, he wouldn't, he wouldn't.' The mantra chased itself in circles in Marco's mind, as if repeating it enough would make it true.

"Sir?" the voice of his butler interrupted his thoughts. He looked up to see Alvin standing in the entrance to his living room and looking at him with some concern. "Will you be requiring -"

Marco didn't even let him finish. "No. Get out. Go home." The thickness in his own voice surprised him. It sounded as if he were near tears. Which, he realized, he was.

To Alvin's credit, he didn't take offense or ask any more questions. He just bowed slightly and made himself scarce. Good. Marco waited until he heard the front door close, then went into his pantry. He got himself a glass of ice and filled it halfway with tonic water. As his best bottle of whiskey hovered over the glass, Marco suddenly dumped the ice and tonic water in the trash. 'This ain't a job for a watered down drink,' he thought randomly as he filled the glass almost to the rim with straight whiskey. He then shambled in a zombielike way back to his recliner, where the white envelope loomed large and was growing by the second.

His hand shook and his eyes watered as he took a large gulp of the drink. His palate was very refined by this point in his life; Marco had had almost exclusively the finest food and drink the world had to offer for what felt like a very long time now. 'How many meals did Jake eat alone?' his traitorous mind asked him with a venom that drained the strength out of him. 'How many Whoppers and TV dinners did he eat with only Homer for company, while you traipsed around and made yourself blind to what your best friend needed? How did you let your selfish fucking heart get away with it for so long? Shame. Shame on you.'

Marco couldn't seem to find the strength to reach over and take the letter. Reading the letter would make it real. Right now, it was just an idea. He could be wrong about what it was. The denial was all that was holding him together.

He finally reached out, but his hand returned to him with his phone instead of the letter. He dialed Jake's number from memory. With each ring, he grew more afraid. Finally, after five or six, Jake's voice greeted him, but it was only the answering machine.

"You've reached Jake Berenson. Please leave a message." That was it. That was all it said. Jake's bland, lifeless voice filled Marco with a sorrow he couldn't even wrap his head around. How had he not seen it before? That was an easy one; because he hadn't wanted to see it. Marco hung up the phone without bothering to leave a message. Leaving a message would be the ultimate absurdity.

Slowly, like a man in a dream, he took the envelope into his lap. He tore it open and shook out several sheets of notebook paper. He somehow forced himself to start reading.

Marco,

I guess you know what this is. You're a smart guy, you always have been. I almost didn't even write this…but in the end, I decided it wasn't fair to let you wonder. It's not really fair for me to lay it on you, either, but I figured you'd probably appreciate knowing more than not knowing.

This is the part where I explain, I guess. None of this is to make you feel sorry for me, by the way. I'm just putting it on paper so you know. Taking all the guesswork out of it. I know you know some of what's gone on with me since the end of the war, but man, you don't know the half of it. I'll tell you, but you won't understand it. I'm living it, and I don't understand it.

Remember that time you tried to shake me out of "my funk," as you called it? You accused me of giving up. You told me that what happened with Rachel and Tom had broken me, and I needed to get off of my ass and fix it. You were more right than you know about the first part; the second part was pure nonsense. I was – am – broken from the way things ended. I might as well have gone myself, because I was as dead as Rachel after that day. If I could have a do-over, I would go myself. But I can't. I've spent hours begging the Ellimist to let me go back and do it right. He either isn't listening or he's just not there. What it boils down to is that I spent a lot of time talking to my empty house.

If that was the end of things, I wouldn't be writing this letter. But I'm still hurting people. I don't mean to, I don't want to, but I can't seem to help it. For a while, I pretended I was okay for my parents' sakes. I didn't do a very good job. Dealing with me in the state I'm in was just exhausting them, tearing them down one day at a time. More and more, I realized that in one day, they lost both of their sons and a niece…it's just that one of those ghosts was hanging around and breathing their air and eating their food, staring them in the face and making them constantly remember what they lost.

So I stopped going over there. For a while, they tried to convince me to get out of my house. I couldn't. I hated the solitude, but I hated hurting them even more. It's the same reason I never reached out to you, man. You're doing just fine, and I didn't want to bring you down. I still don't. I just…I owe you. I owe you this explanation.

I started drinking. Marco read this line with his glass halfway to his lips, debated putting it down…and then finished it off with one grand swallow. Without deciding to do it, he hurled the empty glass at his fireplace and watched impassively as it exploded into a million pieces before returning to the letter. I was drunk. A lot. The problem was that I was doing things that were making me feel shame while I was drunk. I was online, posting on message boards. Basically what it came down to was drunken, self-pitying raving. Luckily, nobody believed the real Jake would be so weak as to whine on anonymous online message boards.

I called Cassie a lot, too. I started doing it every time I drank, which was every day. I cried a lot, I think. I burdened her with things no one should ever have to shoulder. I hit rock bottom when I tried to call one day and I realized she'd blocked my number. Man, I'm telling you…with everything we've seen and done, nothing ever made me feel lower than that. I realized if I didn't quit drinking, I was going to burn down a whole lot of lives while I destroyed my own…so I quit.

I quit drinking, but I needed something else to dull all the pain and hopelessness that beat me over the head every waking minute. I went to a doctor. I drove all the way to Arizona to do it. I didn't want to risk my dad hearing about it. The doc I went to see listened to me for about five minutes, and he prescribed me everything under the sun. I think he would have prescribed me anthrax if I'd asked for it.

Valium for the stress. Xanax for the anxiety. Ambien for the sleepless nights. He even threw in some painkillers, just for variety, I guess. I went back to my house with my shopping bag full of pill bottles and just…cruised. Existed. I don't remember much of it, only that I went in for refills about four weeks sooner than I was supposed to and they cut me off.

You believe that? The doctor who got me hooked on all that shit in the first place cut me off. He said, "Son, I gave you the medication to help you. You took it and started killing yourself with it. I cannot, in good conscious, continue to facilitate your drug habit." Know what I did? I threatened to morph tiger and tear his throat out if he didn't give me my fucking pills. Give the guy credit; he has the balls of an elephant. Refused to give me more pills no matter what I threatened. I left empty handed.

I was thinking about going to my dad and asking him for the pills I needed; by this point, I was that addicted. I was ready to start screwing up my parents' lives again just to get my fix. I happened to be driving through a crappy part of town, and I saw three guys on the corner. You know the type. Chino shorts so long they're basically pants, wifebeaters, gold chains and teeth, shaved heads. I parked my car and walked right up to them. "Whatchoo want, holmes?" one of them said. "I want to get high," I said. By the time I got back in my car, I was a thousand dollars lighter, but I had two ounces of weed, an ounce of heroin, and a half ounce of coke.

I tried it all. The coke made me crazy; even in the state I was in, I realized that was some bad juju. I flushed it down the crapper. But I got on a cycle of doing heroin all day and then smoking reefer to pass out. I ran out of dope. I bought more. I ran out. I bought more. You know the government sends me that monthly check. $11,090 for "retroactive payment for past services rendered to government and country." I started spending it all up on dope within the first two weeks of the month, so you know what I did? I called them up and told them to send me more money. They did. They started sending two of those checks a month. And when my habit got so expensive that even that wasn't enough, they started sending me four. Crazy.

One day I woke up on the bathroom floor with a needle still stuck in my arm. There was blood splattered all over the place. It seriously looked like someone had been murdered in there. All of the mirrors in my house were smashed. On impulse, I morphed to Homer and back again. It works on getting drugs out of your system, by the way. In the ten minutes it took for me to morph and demorph, I went from hopelessly addicted to totally clean. Physically, anyway. But I only made it for about a half a day before I was shooting the dope again. Because mental addiction is way harder to beat than the physical part, and I just didn't know how to get through without being messed up anymore.

I've been clean for three days, as of writing this letter. Don't celebrate. This story doesn't have a happy ending. I just wanted to make sure that I was in my right mind to know for sure if offing myself was the right thing to do. I'm convinced it is. I'm not going to do it in a way where anyone will know. I won't be found. I don't want it to be cinematic and full of drama. There's nothing romantic to me about this. I don't want to leave a legacy. I wish I could erase my entire existence. This is the closest I can come.

So now you know. If you ever gave a damn about me at all, you won't say anything about this to a soul. This is between me and you, because I owe it to you. Let the rest of the world think I just ran away. Tobias did it, why can't I? In a way, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm used up, dude. I'm spent. I'm empty. I just want to find some peace.

Anyway, that's it. This isn't your fault, and I want you to look at it as an inevitability. You couldn't stop it even if you'd tried your hardest, so don't take even an ounce of the blame. And anybody who says suicide is pure selfishness…well, man, that's bullshit. This is just as much for everybody else as it is for me. The world will be better off.

Take care, and remember me like I used to be. Not like this. This isn't me, which is why this isn't even suicide. It's murder; I'm just killing the imposter calling himself Jake. I love you, Marco, I really do. You'll always be my best friend.

-Jake

Marco let the last sheet of paper slip through his numb fingers and fall to the floor. Shame, anger, sorrow, disappointment, and despair all fought each other to be the strongest emotion he was feeling. Even as he experienced this monumental defeat – because that's what it was – his logical mind was already thinking of the best way to handle and deal with it. Because that's what he did – he dealt with things. He dealt with things in a way that Jake obviously couldn't.

But before he handled the situation, before he ever decided how to handle the situation, he would allow himself an escape. He unconsciously dropped his clothing to the floor and focused his mind on the literal wings that would give him the short escape from reality he needed.

'Osprey. Get me the hell out of here. Osprey.'