This is my life. This is all it will ever be.
Chapter 13: Ivan
It's the first of the month again, which means I'm sitting at the computer in my room at the Reyes house.
I search for Jason Michael Morrow.
The routine is the same every single time. I start with the basic searches—his name in quotes, his name with Georgia, his name with Macon. Then I move to social media, scrolling through every Jason Morrow and J. Morrow I can find on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, any platform that exists.
I look carefully at profile pictures of strangers who are never him, never the dark-haired boy with the gentle smile and the protective hands. Then public records, then news articles, then the death records that I check every time even though they make my stomach clench with fear. Even though every time I type his name into that search bar, I'm terrified this will be the month I find him listed among the dead.
That Jay will have died not knowing I never gave up on finding him.
I always find nothing. Usually, I close the laptop after an hour or two, sometimes three if I'm feeling particularly desperate. Then I put the laptop away and go help Rosalyn with dinner, or watch TV with the kids, or do something—anything—to fill the silence that the search leaves behind.
Tonight is different.
I'm scrolling through news articles, a habit I picked up a few years ago because sometimes people show up in local news for random things—car accidents, community events, letters to the editor, high school sports results. It's a long shot, but everything is a long shot at this point. I'm running out of places to look, running out of ideas.
I type his name into the news search. Jason Michael Morrow. I add a date filter for the past month, because I always check recent news first, working my way backward. I hit enter and wait for the results to load, expecting nothing the way I always expect nothing.
There's a hit.
My heart lurches. There's never a hit. In seven years of searching, after religiously checking every possible source, his name has never appeared in a news article, not once, not ever.
I stare at the screen, frozen, afraid to click, afraid to breathe, afraid that it's a different Jason Michael Morrow, afraid that it's going to be an obituary telling me he's been dead for years and I never knew.
My hand is shaking as I move the mouse and click.
The article is from a local paper in Macon, Georgia. The headline is small, barely newsworthy, the kind of thing that probably only made it into the paper to fill space: "Bar Fight Leads to Multiple Arrests." I scan the text, my eyes jumping ahead erratically, looking for his name, searching desperately.
There in the third paragraph.
Jason Michael Morrow, 21, of Macon, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and assault and battery following an altercation at The Rusty Nail bar on Friday night. Four other men were also arrested in connection with the incident.
My hands are shaking so badly I can barely keep them on the keyboard. I read the paragraph again, then again, then a third time, trying to make the words mean something other than what they say, trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. Jason Michael Morrow. Age 21. Macon, Georgia.
It's him. It has to be him. The math is perfect—he'd be twenty-one now. Macon was where he was born. Is that a coincidence? Did he go back there for a reason? How many Jason Michael Morrows could there be who are exactly twenty-one years old right now? What are the odds?
But damn, he was arrested. For assault and battery. For a bar fight.
That doesn't sound like Jay, doesn't sound anything like the boy who taught me to keep my head down and stay out of trouble, who told me that survivors don't draw attention to themselves. But seven years is a long time. People change. Life changes them. God knows I've changed.
I need to see him. I need to know for sure. I need to see his face and know beyond any doubt that this is my Jay.
I go back to the search and try a different approach, my fingers flying over the keys. If he was arrested, there should be a record. Bookingphotos are public in most counties, available online for anyone to see. I search for the county jail's website, navigate through the bureaucratic maze of links, and type in his name with trembling fingers that can barely hit the right keys.
The page loads. It takes forever, or maybe it's just seconds but time has stopped meaning anything.
And fuck, there he is.
Jay's mug shot stares back at me from the screen, and I can't breathe. I can't think. I can't do anything but look at the face I've seen every night in my dreams and every morning in my memories.
He looks like hell. One eye is swollen almost completely shut, bruised purple and black like a storm cloud. His lip is split open, crusted with dried blood that's turned dark. There are cuts on his cheekbone, angry red lines that will scar. Bruises spreading across his jaw in shades of purple and yellow and green. He looks like he lost a fight badly, or maybe won one—it's hard to tell the difference when you're this beat up.
But underneath all the damage, underneath the bruises and the blood and the exhaustion, it's him. I know it's him with a certainty that goes deeper than logic. I know it in my bones, in my blood. The dark hair, longer now than he used to wear it, hanging past his ears. The sharp line of his jaw under the bruises. The shape of his eyes, the one that isn't swollen shut. He's older, so much harder, worn down in ways that make my chest ache and my eyes burn.
But it's Jay.
