…dead three months later.
When I got to the school, Wyatt’s teacher handed me a sealed envelope with my name written across the front. She said Wyatt gave it to her two days before the lake trip and told her, “If anything happens to me, give this to my mom yourself.” My husband kept asking what was inside while we stood in the hallway, but I opened it without answering him.
The letter wasn’t emotional or dramatic. Wyatt wrote that he didn’t want to go to the lake that year because my husband’s friends drank too much during those trips. He said there were arguments the night before they left because he wanted to stay home. Then near the end, Wyatt wrote one sentence that made me reread the page three times.
“If Dad says I fell by accident, please don’t believe him right away.”
My husband immediately started saying Wyatt had been upset lately and probably wrote it after a fight. But his teacher quietly told me Wyatt had come to her office twice that month asking questions about boating laws and storm warnings. She said he seemed nervous every time the trip came up.
I finally started calling people from that weekend directly instead of letting my husband answer for everybody. The stories didn’t match. One person claimed Wyatt slipped near the dock alone. Another said there had been yelling first. One of the wives admitted the men had been drinking since noon even after weather alerts started hitting their phones.
That night, I went into the garage looking for old photo albums and found Wyatt’s backpack shoved behind fishing gear. His phone was inside wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag. The last video on it was only a few seconds long — rain hitting the dock, people shouting, and my husband yelling Wyatt’s name.
Then another man’s voice said, “Don’t go after him. You can barely stand up.”
The investigation reopened the following Tuesday.
My husband moved into his brother’s house two weeks later after detectives interviewed everyone from the trip again. Last Friday, Wyatt’s teacher mailed back the original letter because she said it belonged with family now. It’s sitting inside my kitchen drawer beside Wyatt’s house key and the little restaurant receipt from the last lunch we had together before the lake trip.