Dear Mr. & Mrs. Rodriguez,

Please do not throw this letter away.

I’m writing this to you in hopes that what you are about to read may provide some sort of comfort for you. I can only imagine the pain you’ve been feeling over the last few months. I’ve been in pain too, but a different pain.

I was planning on leaving you alone so that you could grieve for Emily in your own way. It was the least I could do.

But in light of some new developments, I’ve decided that I have a new plan.

At this point, if you’d prefer to rip up this letter and throw it in the fire, I’d completely understand. I will not take offense. Either way, you will never hear from me again.

Part 1: What You Know

I’ll start where you and I last spoke three months ago: the police report.

I want to make it clear that I told the truth in my original report to the police and during my subsequent visits to those station interrogation rooms. Under those fluorescent lights and buzzing air conditioning, drinking stale Keurig coffee, I knew that I was their number one suspect and I knew I was yours too, but it didn’t matter. I was then and continue to be innocent.

Most of the report is still accurate as I write this letter. The night before I first noticed the bruising, Emily and I were walking to my apartment across Prospect Park from the movie theater. About halfway through, on Center Drive, a main artery across the park, we started to argue about how much time we spend at my house and how little we spend at hers. A stupid thing to bicker about in retrospect, but at the time it was the hot button topic in our relationship. We reached the point of the argument in which we were both angry, voices raised, saying hurtful things we’d regret in an hour. I walked away and told her that she should go home, back in the opposite direction.

As I walked away, fuming, I heard her scold me from where she stood.

“Yeah, walk away. Leave me in the fucking park alone. At night. Great idea. Fuck you.”

We didn’t text until the next morning.

As you know, I felt bad about our fight and texted her. We went to brunch and everything seemed fine, except she was acting different. She looked at me as if she wasn’t listening to what I was saying. She nodded but did not seem engaged. At the time, I thought it was because she was angry at me and had maybe hit her breaking point in our relationship, but I pushed those thoughts away in an attempt to move forward and rebuild.

The rest of that day was pretty ordinary for us until I saw the bruise.

She was at my apartment undressing for a shower. When she removed her yoga pants, I noticed a large blue and purple half-circle blotched on the right side of her abdomen, just above her hip. I asked her what it was, concerned by the size.

“Oh.”

She looked at the bruise as if it was the first time seeing it.

“It’s nothing. Um, I think I ran into a doorknob last night. I guess I was still a little drunk.”

The bruise did not look doorknob-shaped, and as she turned to my bathroom, I saw the bruise wrapped around her ribs to the right side of her lower back. Still, I believed her.

Now, Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez, you have to understand that at this point, every strange thing she did was, to me, evidence of her distancing herself and gradually ending our relationship. We texted much less than we normally did. I chalked it up to work. We spent more time alone in our separate apartments.

It felt like the end. At any moment, I expected a “we need to talk” text. Still, I tried every day to remain calm and think positively. I planned a nice date for us that I hoped would bring us back.

By the time of our date, almost a week had passed without seeing each other, which was unusual for us. We went to a restaurant and she looked exceptionally tired. Her hair was a bit unruly, not very like her, and she wasn’t wearing makeup, also not like her. She had large, dark bags under her eyes and her skin was breaking out on her cheeks and chin.

I asked if she was okay. She said she was fine, just tired because she’d been working late nights. Her boss needed some urgent thing for next week. Seemed reasonable. Most of the dinner was quiet. She nodded at my attempts to start a conversation and offered quick, shallow chuckles to my jokes. She seemed preoccupied, like she was running hundreds of simulations in her eyes that I couldn’t see. I noticed fresh pink scratches on the skin of her hands and wrists, the kind that doesn’t fully break the skin but leaves white streaks in their wake.

She spent the night after our uncomfortable dinner. I tried to be physical and playful, but she was uninterested, “tired.” She changed her clothes for bed. I saw the bruise on her ribs, now dark purple and green, the shape of a coffee stain. I noticed it was bigger than last time, now reaching to her breast and lower hip. I didn’t realize yet that it looked remarkably like a bite mark.

But now there was a second bruise, a fresh blue one with dots of purple. Just like the first, it was ring-shaped, but this ring circled her entire thigh like a sickening garter belt.

“What is that on your leg? Are you okay?”

“I accidentally banged it on my kitchen cabinet.”

“That doesn’t look like a kitchen cabinet. Did something bite you?”

The question slipped out from underneath my brain. Of course, she was not bitten. What would bite her? It was nonsense. Still, the question felt necessary and silenced the room. She looked at it, contemplating her answer.

“Are you hearing yourself? Of course not. Can we please just go to sleep?”

We didn’t speak after that. We got into bed and I laid there looking at the ceiling, watching the moonlight on my wall wane as clouds passed. Normally, she’d fall asleep quickly and I’d hear her soft, slow breathing next to me. That night, she was awake and unmoving. I fell asleep first.

A few hours later, I awoke and felt the bed empty. She was standing directly next to me staring intently out of my bedroom window, which offers a modest view of the tall oaks outlining the perimeter of Prospect Park. Both of her hands were on the glass and she leaned in, widening her eyes and concentrating her stare. It looked like she was trying to force her pupils to adjust to something in the darkness, something through the trees.

“Are you okay?”

She didn’t respond. Confused, I went back to sleep. The next morning, she was gone. That marked the end of our relationship, I thought.

We didn’t speak for an entire week. My anxiety quickly turned into anger. I texted her, calling her a piece of shit for ghosting me after we were together for over a year. I explained in detail how she was not a good person for how she handled this, how if she wanted to end this she should’ve done it in person like an adult. No response.

By the following weekend, the anger subsided and I was desperate for closure. Against my better judgment, I showed up at her place unannounced and saw the door to her apartment was ajar. I opened it and peaked in, calling her name. She wasn’t home, but I went in anyway.

Her studio looked about the same as I remembered it except that her bed was completely stripped, leaving just the mattress on a box spring and pillows scattered on the floor. The sheets and duvet were gone. She must’ve taken them with her.

Either way, something felt wrong. That’s when, if you remember, I called the cops.

Everything up until this point you already know from the police report, aside from some of my personal editorializing. I met you later that day for the first time like some sort of dark timeline where I “meet the parents” in the presence of law enforcement with the girlfriend nowhere to be found.

As you know, I talked to the detectives for days. They searched my apartment and cross-examined my parents and everyone else I fucking know. Finally, they told us their only credible theory was that she just left town on her own accord. And that was it.

Part 2: What You Don’t Know

There was one other thing in her apartment.

The brick wall next to her bed, where she had a gallery wall of her favorite art and photography, was completely bare except for a single piece of paper taped to the brick. It was covered in markings. Her desk chair was placed two feet away from the wall, facing the paper.

The piece of paper was some sort of low-quality printout of a map of Prospect Park. I recognized the diamond shape. On the paths of the park, she drew a series of long, curving arrows, all coming from her street. In the areas between paths—the lawns and woods and lakes—there were about 20 scratchy Xs and three large Os. While the Xs were drawn hastily, almost not fully, the Os were circled frantically, multiple times until they were thick and wiry, like a bird’s nest.

I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, but I did feel that unmistakable coldness fill my stomach. Emily, or even I, was in serious danger.

Before I called the cops, I pocketed the piece of paper.

In the weeks after they declared me no longer a suspect, I did what you might expect me to do: I quit my job and hid in my apartment, avoiding everyone. Her disappearance felt like my fault even though I knew it wasn’t.

I looked at her map constantly. I thought about it all day and night. I desperately tried to decipher it like a wartime code. One night, I noticed that one of the circles she drew was very close to where she and I were the night of our fight. I dressed and walked straight into the park. When I got to the spot it was almost four in the morning.

I’ve been to this exact spot many times: Center Drive. To the west is an intersection that connects with one of the main veins of the park. To the east, past a particularly poorly lit area with some dumpsters, another intersection. To the south is a massive lawn, dotted with the occasional tree and trash can, where hundreds of people lounge about on nice days, throwing discs, walking dogs, picnicking with lazily hidden alcoholic beverages. I’ve picnicked on this lawn hundreds of times.

That night, however, the lawn was a dark, black expanse of nothing. Shadowy shapes in the distance played tricks on my eyes. The air was misty from rain and the only light was the trail of yellow cones emanating from the street lamps. Typically, you might see a night runner or a longboarder or maybe even an adventurous couple after a date, but when I arrived, there was no one.

I looked at the map. I turned to face the north, which was nothing but some trees at the street’s edge, a short fence, and then more trees and brush going up a hill. The circle was right where I was looking: the top of the hill.

I looked around. With nobody in sight, I hopped the fence and quickly found myself in a thicket of trees that, if I didn’t know better, could’ve stretched for miles.

Behind my phone’s flashlight, I pushed deeper and deeper, tripping on knotted roots, wetting my clothes with dew, and cracking twigs under my feet. I looked back. I could just barely make out the street lamps.

As I neared the top of the hill, the light of my phone passed over and then stopped upon something sleek in the distance, about 20 feet in front of me. My short, exasperated breathes stopped and I saw what looked like a large, glistening piece of roughly-carved onyx placed precariously next to a tree. It seemed to be moving: slightly growing and then slightly shrinking. It was breathing. It wasn’t until it turned to look at me that I could see it was a bony figure with onyx skin crouched in the brush.

All I could make of the face were the pupils reflecting the light from my phone, the way you can see a cat watching you in the dead of night because of the reflection in its eyes. I quickly stepped back, unable to scream, tripped over a root and fell.

That’s all I remember of that night.

I woke up in my bed, still in my damp clothes and muddy shoes. The clock said four in the afternoon. I had been asleep for 12 hours. I surveyed myself. Everything was normal except for a tear on the left shoulder of my hoodie. I went to the bathroom, removed my clothes, and stared at my naked body in the mirror.

On my left shoulder was a deep purple bruise, extending down to my pectoral, around my bicep, collarbone, and back. Just like Emily’s, it was in the shape of a ring circling the corner of my torso, with the most intense clotting toward the outside. My shoulder was in something’s mouth.

I touched it softly with my finger. The pain seared down my spine like a sudden fire. The searing faded and was replaced by a wave of nausea. I vomited into the toilet. There wasn’t much, but there was blood.

Over the next two days, I debated whether I should report this to someone, anyone. But as the incident faded more and more into the past, my confidence in my memory faltered. I questioned what I saw. Was I sure it was real?

At the same time, my bruise was changing colors and spreading down my torso and up my neck. Less like poison coursing out from a bite and more like lakes of blood pooling around the injury. The pain faded to a dull but prominent pulsing. I couldn’t sleep. Pain killers did nothing. And worst of all, I felt incomplete.

I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I didn’t even want to forget. I wanted more. I kept looking at the map on my phone. There were two more circles that Emily had drawn. I suspected that the Xs were places she had tried and failed, though I was not sure what “trying” or “failing” meant.

I was back in the park two nights later. I didn’t know why I was there except that my pulsating bruise was generating some deep urge that needed to be satiated. The only way to do that, in my mind, was to find the thing that did it. I needed to feel more. I needed more. I still can’t understand this urge even as I write this letter, but I can tell you it’s only intensified.

I went to the second circle on the map, poked around in the trees off the beaten path for hours like a mad man. I limped because I couldn’t walk without aggravating my injury.

After a few hours, I ran into an older man searching the forest just like I was. We locked eyes in the reciprocal light from our phones and knew that we were on the same mission. Without saying a word, we went our separate ways. I felt embarrassed. I imagine he did too.

I returned home empty-handed and felt true disappointment. The following night, I went back. And then I went back every night after for at least two weeks, I think. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell as the nights began to blend into a mass of time spent searching. I don’t remember doing anything during the day except pacing around my house for hours on end and staring out my window into the park, waiting for the sun to go down.

This brings us to the night I want to tell you about.

I’m not sure if it was last night or three nights ago. All I know is that it was humid and moonless when I set out into the trees again. My bruise had spread down my torso and up my neck like I was dipped in purple tie-dye, rubber-banded, and let out to dry. At this point, I had hit every spot on your daughter’s map. I even began adding my own annotations to the map for whoever finds it next.

Anyway, the trees looked about as they always do: crooked and crowded. I walked around for two hours in the dark and just listened. Finally, I heard a human noise in the distance. It was some sort of agonized moan, soft and desperate.

I took out my new heavy-duty flashlight, hoping to find my prize and not just another searcher like me.

And there she was.

Your daughter.

Emily was on her bedsheets, which were spread out like a picnic blanket in the small clearing. She was completely naked, lying supine on the sheets with her arms and legs spread as wide as she could get them. Every inch of her skin was covered in dirt and bruises in deep blacks, blues, and purples. She had massive bite marks from head to toe, some wounds still open and oozing. Her hair was matted with mud and leaves and her eyes were wide open, staring at the tips of the trees.

She mumbled softly to herself, jerking her head in every direction. She didn’t notice my flashlight or didn’t care. I was unable to breathe, only step forward. When my foot cracked a stick beneath it, her head jerked painfully forward and she looked directly at me, catching the shine of my flashlight in her dilated pupils.

When she saw I was not who she wanted, she turned back to the sky.

Part 3: What You Should Know

I’m sorry to report that I did not tell the authorities that I found your daughter alive in the forest. That’s for you to do if you decide it’s worth it. If you ask me, Emily is right where she wants to be, or she’s already gone for good.

As for me, I’m currently sitting cross-legged in the dark on the lawn near where Emily and I first fought, scribbling this letter to you on a legal pad as fast as I can. Please excuse any typos or poor handwriting you may have encountered while reading this. I’m in a bit of a rush and the light is scarce. The night will not last forever.

When I am done writing this letter, I will fold it up and place it in a stamped envelope addressed to you. I have it already prepared. As there is no mailbox near me, I will leave it on a bench and hope that someone finds it and mails it. If not, then this was all for nothing.

Then, I will walk into the woods, back to where I found your daughter. If, by some miracle, she is still there, I will join her. If she is not, then I will take her place on those sheets and patiently await my turn.