Driving north on Route 1, Mo got a call from a childhood friend. It was a Friday afternoon, a week into her senior year in college, and her friend was asking if she could please pull over. Mo had just made it across the bridge to the mainland, and into the odd stretch where lanes began and ended like sentences, abruptly, left incomplete. “You can just tell me,” Mo said. “I can’t,” came the reply. Mo pulled into a gas station.
Her friend was calling from Oberlin, Ohio, where she was a student, where it was still hot and lush, that time of year, the town full of kids in shorts and crates of fresh apples.
A recent Oberlin graduate, Orion was a good friend of Mo’s. They got to know each other on the middle school track team, but lost touch when Mo moved away for boarding school. Three summers earlier, now college students, they met again on a remote Maine island, where they became close.
Orion had grown up on that island, twelve nautical miles off the mainland’s coast. It was where Mo’s family summered, so Orion may have been the boy she remembered, vaguely, from that time – one of the few kids her age. They may have played together, she told me, then returned to their separate lives in the fall, their early memories dissipating like the summer heat.
“It can’t be Orion,” Mo now said into her phone, putting the gas nozzle back on the pump. “They must have gotten the name wrong.”
“They used his full name,” her friend countered. She’d expected resistance, knowing how close Mo and Orion had been.
Mo laughed. She told her friend it was impossible. Off the phone, she continued on her way to a dinner party. She’d see Orion there—it was a send-off for his best friend, Will, who was joining the Peace Corps—and all would be cleared up. The day before, Orion had texted Mo and Will, saying he was excited to see them. They’d start a bon-fire and get pizza. Or, that was the plan.
Mo called Will to ask if he’d heard anything. He hadn’t. Like her, he laughed at the thought of their friend as a murderer. “Yeah right,” he said, “the vegetarian who couldn’t watch Game of Thrones.”
Mo wasn’t yet worried. But off the call with Will, she dialed Orion. His phone was going straight to voicemail.
At Will’s parents, Mo found the story in the local newspaper. Orion’s name was a typo, she decided. By dinnertime, though, the news was online. There were photos, and in the photos, Orion.
In a daze, Mo sat on the couch, surrounded by friends in similar states. Will’s parents observed at a distance. Barely a couple of months earlier, their son, fresh out of college, went on a cross-country road trip with Orion. Before and after their trip, Mo saw the two of them often; they’d come hang out at the restaurant where she worked, to keep her company, or meet at the lake at the edge of town for a swim. She saw them multiple times each week. “There were no signs,” she told me.
Now, in his parents’ living room, Will kept saying, “This isn’t happening. My best friend didn’t just do this.”
Later that night, in her own parents’ home, Mo wrote Orion a letter. “Today,” she began,
“I learned that you killed your family […] I was on my way to Will’s house, and you were supposed to be there too, you promised me, but instead you were in a jail cell somewhere in Massachusetts. […] Dear Orion, what is happening? The salad was soggy and the pizza was cold and Will made us play a stupid game, so you didn’t really miss out on much.
My dear heart,”
She wouldn’t send him this letter. But she would send others.
***
The following week, I saw Mo on campus. We got food at the cafeteria—right beneath the library stacks, which always smelled of lunch—and carried our bowls out to the grass. As we sat down, she told me her friend had killed his mom, grandma, grandpa and their caretaker with a baseball bat, then walked over to a neighbor’s house, naked and covered in blood, to tell them what he had done.
Orion was the most gentle soul, Mo also said, one of the sweetest, most caring people she knew. It was mind-boggling to think of him as capable of murder. “Of any kind of harm, really,” she added. Everyone who’d known him was similarly baffled. “I just can’t make sense of any of it,” one of his high school teachers told a journalist. The Orion she knew “would never have done something like that he is being accused (of).” He had no history of mental illness, no substance use disorder, no troubles anyone knew of, and no motive for the killings. There was, it seemed, no explanation.
***
Mo and I met in our first year of college, on a winter hike up McFarland mountain. In a group photo from the summit, an hour later, we’re standing close together, arms around each other. Mo’s in her thin, bright orange jacket, and I’m in a baggy white sweatshirt, holding my sleeves from the inside. I had no gloves on, nor a coat, which I didn’t yet own. The photo reminds me I’d thought—despite, or perhaps because, I’d never lived anywhere this cold—that I could get by without one. It also reminds me of how I used to scan the muted colors of our campus, that first winter, for Mo’s orange jacket. The brightness she carried everywhere.
By spring, Mo and I saw each other almost daily, though we had no classes together. We shared vanilla green teas and gluten free noodles and walked to each other’s dorm rooms at night for sleepovers. In the mornings, we’d recite our dreams as though they were epic poems, then analyze them over coffee in a dining hall booth. Mo knew my work schedule at the library, and often came to visit—as Will and Orion would do, a couple of years later, for her—to chat away the slow, late hours.
Though I didn’t desire Mo, I loved her the way I loved some men, with that odd fascination for her past, and a sadness over having missed so much of it. Over not having seen what she couldn’t tell me.
***
Soon after Orion was put in jail, his twin brother, Cooper, texted Mo. Orion really wanted to talk with her; he wanted to know if she’d ever had feelings for him. Cooper apologized for the awkward question. Orion kept insisting that he ask her.
It was awkward, Mo thought, to have Cooper as a middleman. “Why don’t you tell him to send me a letter?” she texted back with her address. And so Orion wrote a letter, and Mo responded.
She’s been waiting “not-so-patiently” for his letter to arrive, she wrote in her response. She’s also been listening to King Pleasure Sings, Annie Ross Sings—the album he’d recommended—while penning her words. “You were right,” she wrote. She really did like it.
The following summer, Cooper came out to the remote island where he and Orion had grown up, where Mo and Orion had reconnected. Orion would often spend summers there after the family moved to the mainland, while Cooper, preferring to hang out with school friends, stayed back at their parents’. Now that Orion could no longer go, Cooper felt he had to. He wanted to be close to him in this way, across the distance of open and closed spaces.
Mo was also on the island that summer. One afternoon, sitting with Cooper by the lighthouse, she asked if he knew a King Pleasure’s song called “I’m in the Mood for Love.” It was a track from the album Orion had recommended. Cooper did, and immediately started singing. He was shocked when Mo joined him. They both knew the lyrics by heart. “It felt so good to share that song at that moment,” she remembered.
Orion used to sing it in the shower, Cooper told her, emphasizing one word in particular, dragging out the vowels. Cooper had found it annoying at the time, he said, laughing now, nostalgic. How easy it was to miss an annoyance.
“What word was it?” I asked Mo, as she may have asked Cooper.
It was “fear.”
***
Two months after the murders, Mo moved to that same remote island—this time to spend the winter. She was collecting seeds for the island farm, founded by Orion and Cooper’s aunt, who was still its manager, and Mo’s boss. The island was small in both size and population, with just about seventy year-round residents. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone had known Orion.
In her first letter to him, Mo wrote about seeds. She asked about the novel he’s been writing. “If you’re looking for something to read,” she wrote, “I’d recommend A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. It totally changed my life last year.” Reading this, I reached for my own copy of the book, which Mo had borrowed, and found the leaf she’d pressed in its pages, still where she’d left it. I texted to ask if Orion had read it. “He liked it a lot,” she responded.
Towards the end of that letter, Mo asked Orion about religion. “You said you had a series of spiritual experiences,” she wrote, “what did you mean by that?” It was fine if he didn’t want to share, she also wrote. She just wanted to ask.
Before the murders, Orion would go to church every Sunday. He said it was for the music, which wasn’t hard to believe, coming from a gifted drummer who planned to live off his art. When that dream receded, though, like all others, Orion’s faith came to the surface. He’d kept it a secret in the outside world—worried, Mo assumed, of being ridiculed. His dad used to say Christianity was “hogwash.” His aunt, Mo’s boss at the farm, did the same. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.
On the remote island, Mo started going to church. She went every Sunday, wanting to sit where Orion had sat, to hear what he’d listened to, to try to understand what could have gotten to him, and how it did.
“I promise to write to you often,” she signed that first letter. “I have faith in you.” Before mailing this letter out, though, she made a copy. She would do the same for the next letter, and the one after that, and the one after. She may have had faith in him, but perhaps not in herself. She wanted to have a record of what she’d shared—to be able to trace his responses back to her words, and, where she couldn’t, to be able to locate the slippage. She worried she might get gaslighted.
But a few months in, Mo stopped making copies. “I trust Orion loves me so much,” she told me, “I don’t think twice now before sharing with him.” She trusted herself more, too: not only to share freely with Orion—“almost as much,” she told me, “as I would with a therapist”—but to stop keeping track of what she did. I wondered whether these trusts were tied together, whether their correlation made the more intrinsic, essential one—Mo’s trust in herself—more vulnerable.
***
In addition to the letters she sent Orion, Mo wrote him letters she didn’t send. They were all addressed to him, but were much briefer, journal-like, like the one she wrote that first night, after Will’s party. They all ended the same way, with the phrase “my dear heart,” its comma like a foot dangling off a cliff.
When “Letters I wrote but never sent” landed in my inbox as a google doc, I scanned it hungrily, greedily, marveling at the privilege of peering into Mo’s mind, at the permission to pry into a relationship not my own—the thrill and shame of launching at something so intimate. What business did I have, reading these letters—all addressed to someone who might never get to? I let my eyes run over the words, unfocused, but the signature jumped up at me still, sharp against the blurred background. “My dear heart,” “my dear heart,” like a beat.
When I asked Mo about the phrase, she said it was a quote—“Courage, my dear heart”—but didn’t remember where it was from. She’d toyed, for a while, with the thought of getting it tattooed. But it was “good to live life,” she believed, “without constantly protecting your heart.” She didn’t get the tattoo. Still, this line offered something she needed, back then—a reminder to be brave—though “courage” was the one word she’d left out. When I looked it up, I saw she’d also added, unintentionally, a word that doesn’t appear in the original. “Courage, dear heart,” reads the line in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There’s no “my.” In this way, I think, Mo did make it hers.
I think of the words that jump at us, and leap away. At those that seem to jump out of our mouths—that want to be sung differently than the rest.
***
A month into her winter stay on the remote island, Mo took the ferry to the mainland. She then drove to see Orion’s dad at his house—the one where they’d all lived together, where he now lived alone. The living room was full of bouquets, she remembered, the flowers thinned and darkened, having sat around for months. Their vases, cloudy with dust, were completely dry.
Mo’s description of that living room was ironically vivid. From time to time, the image would surface in my mind, still haunting. Once, it was her childhood home I was imagining, its crimson walls faded to grayscale. At other times I saw spaces I didn’t recognize, but felt familiar with: variations on some “standard” American home no one actually lived in, like the set of a sitcom.
Later that winter, Orion answered, in a letter, a question Mo had asked after visiting his dad. Would he rather be a flower growing in a field, where no one ever saw him, or one clipped at its prime, and placed on a kitchen table?
“My gut reaction,” Orion responded,
“was that I would want to be the solitary flower, unperturbed as a part of nature, meshing with my surroundings, friend of the bees… but then I also thought how much it can mean to be part of a bouquet. I used to love picking flowers with and for my mother, and every once in a while I would surprise her with a bouquet of whatever flowers I could find. Without fail this would make my mother filled with joy and she would cry tears of joy. This might be a little too personal, but on that fateful day when I lost my mind and killed my mother, I still somehow found it within me to place a bouquet on her dead body (and the other bodies also received flowers)—a sign of my love for her. I hope to God that my mom saw that bouquet.”
I find myself moved by the phrase “friend of the bees,” perhaps because I know it would be decades before Orion set foot in a field, or because his friends, like Mo, are free to fly off while he remains still, neither clipped young nor left to be solitary—and yet, in a sense, both.
Back at Orion’s childhood home, Mo was given a tour. His dad showed her into his mom’s office, which still felt like trespassing, like walking into her diary. Orion’s dad pointed out different mementos from and of Orion, as if on a mission to prove she’d loved him, that she’d been a good mom. Mo didn’t need to be convinced; she knew this. But she understood the impulse.
I wondered if Mo, too, had felt a certain urge to prove to those who hadn’t met Orion that he really was the sweet and gentle person she remembered. I wondered if the burden of proof, if she’d felt it, had been exacerbated by the fact they likely never would.
***
“Dear Orion,” opens the second letter Mo didn’t send, “You have changed everything.”
That winter, on the remote island, she started imagining him creeping up on her in the dark. She imagined him in crowds, too, blending in with other bodies until he reached hers. She was scared he’d escape jail and ask her to hide him.
Mo tried to recall each day she’d ever spent with Orion, which was, of course, impossible. She searched her mind for “signs of depression, of anger, of loneliness, of anxiety,” and didn’t find any. “So far,” she wrote in the third unsent letter, “I have only found happiness.”
“Do you remember,” she asked,
“The day we swam across the harbor to Meadow island to have lunch? I made you carry our sandwiches over your head, but you got tired and annoyed, so you threw them […] but I was stubborn; I told you we were going to eat them anyways. Do you remember how we sat […] eating our soggy, salty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and neither of us said a word […] That was my favorite day of the whole summer.
My dear heart,”
On some days, though, her connection with Orion, and the happiness it brought, seemed distant, inexplicable. “I’m starting to wonder if I ever knew you,” she wrote in the fourth unsent letter. “I don’t trust my memory anymore.”
Mo started getting panic attacks. She’d suddenly be convinced Orion was there—that he’d found her.
“My biggest fear,” she wrote in the fifth unsent letter,
“is becoming afraid of you. You should know I’m doing the best I can […] I tell myself that if I were to see you—run into you at the grocer or on the corner perhaps—I would greet you with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I wouldn’t give you away to the police. I would keep you all to myself. I would even take you on a hike somewhere, and we would walk into the dark woods with nothing in between us.”
But Mo was starting to have nightmares. In another unsent letter, she wrote, “every night when I turn off the light and look into the darkness, I feel you there.”
***
A couple of years later, Mo was put in touch with a shaman. Cheryl was now in her eighties, one of several women who’d started coming to the same remote island on artist residencies back in the 70’s. Like many of them, Cheryl was married to a man, and, also like many, she was a lesbian. While their husbands stayed back on the mainland, the women found each other on the island, their world away from the world.
Mo was living on a different island then, on the opposite side of the country. Over the phone with Cheryl—who became a shaman, the story goes, after she’d seen a ghost—Mo learned the older woman has been traveling to the “collective unconscious” for years. On her next trip, Cheryl said, she could look for Orion. Mo thanked her and waited.
On her return, Cheryl said she’d sensed something inexplicable. Orion had two souls. The person Mo knew, according to Cheryl, was not the one who killed his family. Mo wasn’t sure what to make of it. Neither was Cheryl. She’d never seen anything like it before. But she did see a cord connecting Mo to Orion. She could sever it on her next trip, Cheryl offered, if Mo wanted her to. She did.
“I’m going to take you with me,” Cheryl said. “You don’t need to do anything, but just be aware. Some people feel it when I take them.”
It was April, and Mo had recently been diagnosed with POTS and EDS. She had very low blood pressure and often fainted. On her doctor’s orders, she wore a blood pressure monitor, and spent most of her time in bed, in the rustic homestead where she and her then partner lived. It had no indoor toilets.
One day, heading out to the outhouse, she couldn’t orient herself. The surrounding woods were suddenly unfamiliar. She’d been living at the homestead for over a year—working at the farm it was on—and yet, somehow, she’d never seen those trees.
In the two years since Orion killed his family, Mo has been terrified of losing her mind. She feared it was happening now. Her blood pressure monitor displayed numbers she’d never seen before, either. She desperately needed the bathroom, but couldn’t bring herself to walk into the strange woods. She also couldn’t wait. With no other choice, Mo crouched right by the path to poop.
Later, she’d learn it had been that moment—when she could not find her way—that Cheryl went to the collective unconscious. It made sense that she’d felt disoriented, Cheryl later explained; a part of her was not in those woods. But the trip had been successful. The cord had been severed.
***
“I think everyone deserves a friend,” Mo told me one day, a few months after the murders. We were standing on the red bricks by the only library on campus, talking—perhaps for the first time—about her correspondence with Orion. I nodded, and clipped this sentence to my memory. A couple of years later, I came across it in an unsent letter:
“I believe everyone deserves a friend, […] even murderers who kill their own families […] even murderers who miss dinner plans because they’re off murdering.”
Mo knew not everyone was quite as forgiving. Several of Orion’s mom’s friends were furious with him. They acted, Mo said, as though the story had “sides,” as though Orion’s crime eliminated his loss, as though the two were mutually exclusive. On the remote island, people vilified Orion. Mo pitied them, but she was also angry. “I think the postmaster disapproves of our correspondence,” she wrote,
[…] I want to slap her across the face and hug her at the same time […] I want her to see you how I see you.
My dear heart,”
***
Orion’s mom had a bad feeling when she first noticed he wasn’t home. She knew something was up with her son, though she didn’t quite know what. She feared he was going to kill himself.
Just a short while earlier, Orion had stolen fifty bucks from her wallet, then got in her minivan and drove off. In Waldoboro, a small Maine town, he pulled into a diner named Moody’s.
While Mo told me the story, I imagined her hearing it, perhaps from Cooper, perhaps by the lighthouse of that small island—sitting on the rocks that, she felt, knew her better than any human.
Orion abandoned his mom’s minivan in the Moody’s Diner parking lot. There was still gas in the tank, Mo told me, so it wasn’t clear why he’d done this. It also wasn’t clear how he then got to Boston.
Sometime after he’d arrived, Orion called his mom, and asked her to come get him. Relieved, she left home right away, and soon, they were on their way back north again. Still in Massachusetts, they passed near Orion’s grandparents’ place, and decided to stop for a visit. It wasn’t planned. They just happened to drive right by.
“Dear Orion,”
Another letter begins, then ends right away—
“My dear heart,”
It seems that something in Orion’s brain “switched,” Mo said, around the time he stole his mom’s money and minivan. Did he know where he was going? I wonder. Did he know what he was about to do?
Earlier that day, Orion called an old professor from Oberlin. “I think I have to kill my mother,” he’d said. The professor called a police station in Maine, but Orion was not in Maine.
In another unsent letter, Mo asks,
“Why did you do it? Why did you kill your mother? I know you are not allowed to talk about your case, but if you could, would you? What would you say? Tell me.”
***
Once in a while, I look Orion up online. There had been an article about his music, Mo told me, years before the murders. It called him a “promising young drummer,” she paraphrased, a “rising star.” I googled his name + gifted drummer, but still got results only about the murders. That article was probably buried now, Mo said, beneath those reports. She’d used that word, “buried.” Like the victims, like the rising, setting star.
Orion reportedly told police, I read over and over again, that he “freed” his victims. The phrase appears in almost every article I found. Instinctively, I wanted to ask “from what?,” but emotionally, I was alarmed to discover, it wasn’t hard to imagine an answer. It wasn’t hard to imagine many answers. I don’t mean to say I imagined rationales for the murders, but rather, that I understood how, faced with a person in shackles, one may try to break them. If they saw the shackles, that is. If they loved the person.
I was also alarmed to discover, as I went about my own day to day, how often I did things I didn’t understand. Things I felt I hadn’t consented to. How often my own actions seemed to carry themselves out, to have no rationale whatsoever.
“Yesterday,” Mo wrote,
“I found the beaten skeleton of a Herring Gull in the tall grass by the shipwreck. I held the skull, brushing the soil from the eye sockets. I peeled the remaining skin from the bones, took it back to my house, and placed it on the kitchen counter. Today, while chopping onions for soup, I sliced the skull in half with a butcher’s knife, then returned to dicing the onion.
My dear heart,”
***
I think Mo may have said, at some point, that I “would have loved” Orion. But I’m not sure she did. It may have been something I told myself—a thought I’d had while listening to her describe him. My own words dressed up, as she talked, in her voice.
In Mo’s first clear memory of Orion—following the vague childhood recollections from the island—it’s the middle of a track team practice, and some guy just called her legs “fat.”
“They’re strong,” Orion corrected. “I think it’s really cool,” he also said, “that she’s faster than you.”
Another friend, Trueman, also came to her defense. “My two allies,” Mo remembered thinking. Trueman, who’d also been close with Orion, never knew him as a murderer. He died two winters earlier, walking on the frozen lake at the edge of town—where they’d all swam together—when the ice beneath him gave.
***
In the sky, Mo told me, the constellations of Orion and Scorpius—her astrological sign—are right across from one another. “No matter when you look,” writes photographer Dennis Mammana, “you’ll never find [them] in the sky together. As Orion sets, Scorpius rises. And as Scorpius sets, Orion rises.”
In Greek mythology, Orion is a skilled hunter who, having boasted about his killings, dies of a scorpion sting. The gods commemorated both figures in the sky—Orion with his bat and belt, Scorpion with his tail and claws—but decided to keep them as far apart as possible. As Mammana put it, they wanted to prevent the enemies from “stirring up trouble in heaven as they purportedly did on earth.”
Mo and Orion now live on near-opposite sides of the country. He’s been sentenced to life in prison. She hasn’t yet visited. When I last asked if she would, she said she wanted to, but didn’t feel ready. She wanted to wait until she was no longer afraid of him. She could trust and fear him, she found, at once.
I think of the word Orion had sung differently than others, “fear,” and of the one Mo omitted from her signatures, “courage.” I don’t think she was lacking any, but rather that fear and courage, like trust and trepidation, and even—at times, as in Orion’s case—victim and perpetrator, can fold into each other, into the same moment, the same person. Aren’t we all, sometimes, both?
“Dear Orion,” opens Mo’s last unsent letter,
“In the stories of the stars, you carry a club and a lion’s head. They named you the best hunter, killing all of Gaia’s animals. Wouldn’t it be easy, if we could blame everything on fate and names?”
Up in the night sky, Orion has been holding a bat since time immemorial. “As for now,” he admitted in a letter to Mo, life seemed, to him, “one great big Mystery.”
It’s been years, she told me, since she wrote back.
***
When I first asked Mo for permission to write about her friendship with Orion—and about their writing to one another—I also asked if she would ask him for his on my behalf. It was back when they still exchanged letters, and he must have agreed, we both think, because I wrote a draft of this piece. I then let it sit for five years. When I asked Mo more recently if I could return to it—wanting to make sure she was still comfortable—I also asked if she remembered what Orion had said. I then asked her to ask Cooper to ask Orion again. “Orion said it’s all good,” Cooper texted Mo; he trusted her judgement. But the broken-telephone nature of the exchange made both Mo and me want to confirm he understood what I was asking for: permission not only to write about him, but to quote his own writing. Mo was texting both Cooper and me at once, acting as the kind of “middle man” Cooper himself had been years ago, when he first reached out to Mo, when she first suggested Orion write her a letter. It was precisely this kind of mediation she’d hoped to go around—preferring a slow exchange over a faster one, where the send button was actually a person. Cooper was a middleman now, too, but he was also a participant in the conversation. It was he who suggested, gently, gingerly—“This was a thought of mine, just a thought, I don’t want to impose”—that Orion contribute something to the piece, if I had a prompt. Moved but caught off guard, I suggested his friendship with Mo, or friendship in general, and so, it was through this crowded channel, and not despite it, that more of his words reached me, and now, you. “True friends always abide in each other’s hearts,” Orion wrote, “even when circumstances declare that they cannot be together. When they finally are able to share togetherness, what a joy there will be! As if they never parted. Truly, truly in spirit—they never did.”
Shir Kehila is a freelance writer and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Off Assignment, Indiana Review, the anthology Here for All the Reasons (Turner Publishing, 2026), and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia, and received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Monson Arts Residency.