If you’re reading this, know that I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop what happened on your thirteenth birthday. I’m not even sure how it came to be. 

I want to blame your mother. She’s the one who left, after all. Not that she wouldn’t have blamed me. My archeology work (or my “old bones and superstitious trash,” as she called it) never did sit well with her. Would she have stopped me from taking you to the dig that day? 

Hopefully, you remember that botched birthday surprise of a take-your-daughter-to-work day. The dig site was that glaringly green grassy hill with those dandelions growing up it like a crescent moon. I remember how gently you picked them as my team dug, looking for bodies. 

We were studying burial rites and, fortunately for us, we’d found a treasure trove. We identified a lot of graves that day. We collected a lot of offerings and artifacts. We also kicked up a lot of dust and broke as much history as we preserved. 

We got you sick, too. You’d started coughing, wetly and weakly, as early as the drive back home. 

Sick, however, is not what you stayed. You were…too wrong, for an illness. Coughing became screaming. You looked unfathomable. I moved you to the basement and stopped looking too closely. Whenever I brought you food, you’d sometimes grab it with these two new left hands of yours. At other times it was your one large hand with the extra fingers, each having accrued so many more joints that a single one could, like a constrictor snake, grab the entire plate. And yet your hands, free of all the eyes and mouths and hair that had come to cover all too much of you, were the last parts of you that were even almost human.  

But if you’ve read this far, my darling daughter, then you’ve been made right again! For seven months I’ve toiled to make it so, to the soundtrack of your shrieking and smashing and shaking our house’s foundations. I’ve scoured too many libraries, haunted too many unhinged chatrooms, and wet my journals with too many tears for your anguish not to end. 

And for that, too, I’m sorry. Because these words are the last you’ll ever know of me. The only way you get to be you again, Delilah, is without me.

 I’m still not sure who my digging offended. I try not to believe in the gods and ghosts of the people I study, much as your mother doesn’t believe me. But this only ends when I remind them of who they’re really after.

So, with these last words, I would ask two things of you. The first is to always remember: Everything I’ve done, I’ve always done for you.  

The second is to never, ever, go down into the basement. You don’t need to see what’s down there, even if it asks you to. 

Love,

Dad