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Alex sent letters to the mansion after the family scattered. I learned this years later through the kind of secondhand information that travels in circles even when you're trying to stay out of them. Letters to the house. Regular ones, apparently. Checking in. Making sure the building was maintained, that Mom was functional, that whoever was still there knew they weren't forgotten.

I wasn't at the address anymore. So there were no letters for me.

I've turned this over more times than is probably healthy. It isn't his fault — he had no way of knowing I'd left, and once I'd left I made myself genuinely difficult to find. He was doing the thing he's always done, which is try to hold the family together from whatever distance he found himself at. The fact that I'd removed myself from the equation before he started writing isn't something he could have accounted for.

But there's still something I carry about it. The image of letters arriving at a house I wasn't in. Someone reading them, or not reading them. No one writing back on my behalf to say: he's gone, try somewhere else.

What I remember about Alex is the active quality of his care. He wasn't warm in a passive way — he looked for opportunities to show up. He'd take an interest in whatever you were doing, ask real questions, put himself between someone and harm when he could manage it. He stayed in the city after things fell apart, started sending letters, kept a line open to a house that was gradually emptying.

He got called Tyrant. I remember the first time I saw that word in a headline and something in me went cold and then hot in quick succession. He tried to avoid the transformation in public specifically because he'd seen how people reacted to it. He was protecting others from their own fear of him, and they repaid that by giving him a name that described the thing he was most careful not to be.

I want to say I'm sorry about the letters. Not as an apology exactly — I didn't do anything wrong by leaving, or I don't think I did — but as an acknowledgement. He kept the line open and I wasn't on the other end, and that wasn't what he deserved.

I think he'll be all right to see again. Out of everyone in that house, Alex is the one I'm least afraid of the conversation with. That should probably tell me something.