My Brother’s Keeper

Written for Missy’s Mad Challenge #073.
The prompt appears below. Here’s my take.

“I didn’t mean to keep the secret, but once I had it,
it wouldn’t let me go.”

The day my brother died, I was compelled to visit the bedroom we shared as boys …. the room which was now his office in the old house where he lived with his wife. It was there that I found his journal wrapped in tin foil and wedged behind the radiator.

The entries were mundane at first …. work complaints, home repairs, sketches of birds. Then I reached the final pages, dated three weeks before the accident. He’d written about the brake lines, about the insurance money, about how sorry he was but how necessary it had become.

Necessary? Was he in that deep? Were things so bad, he couldn’t come to me for help? I would have done anything; he knew that.

I burned those pages in his workshop sink, watching his admission curl into ash.

At the funeral, friends spoke of tragedy and fate. His widow cried into my shoulder. His daughter asked me to say a few words. I stood at the podium and called him brave, loving, gone too soon.

The truth sits in my chest like a stone. Some mornings I wake up determined to confess what I know, but then I remember his children’s faces, his wife’s grief already so heavy.

The secret keeps me now …. not the other way around.

This is “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age