Dear Jules,

I write to you now compelled by feelings of jealously, regret, and culpability for what could perhaps be illegal conduct. You don’t know me. I am not Valerie N. Blackwell. I am writing to you from Valerie’s email account surreptitiously because I think this method of contact is safest for us all. I will introduce myself as Mr. Blackwell, although that is not the name I use in my day-to-day life any more than Jules is yours. You should think of me only as Blackwell and if all goes well, you will never know me by any other name.

Although you don’t know me, I know you in a way I imagine is causing your stomach to turn. The disparity in our mutual familiarity with one another is likely to create a discordance in our relationship, but I hope this is an inequality you choose to accept.

Yes, I know you most gravely through your email exchanges with Valerie. And as we both now realize, the information that came into my possession when I gained access to Valerie’s email account could do a great deal of damage to both your public and private life. Let me be clear in saying, I never intended to be in this position and furthermore, I am absolutely hoping to avoid any harm I might inflict upon you. We both can imagine how, in the wrong hands, the information contained within Valerie’s emails could bring great tragedy to your family, your career, and perhaps your entire political party.

It seems you and I have both come to believe the information contained in your emails exchanged with Valerie has already fallen into hands that may attempt to inflict harm. Furthermore, a sort of harm that evidently would elicit your retribution upon me and my family in one form or another. From my humiliating perspective, this entire affair has become impossible for you to control. As it often is with my family, and in my profession as a state-appointed grief counselor, I am put in the position where I must arbitrate a childish conflict between two difficult individuals. And so with the advice of select legal counsel and as the traditional head of my unfortunate family, I have decided to quell these matters with what follows in the hopes I may shield us all from any further discomfort.

My legal counsel has helped me make the following calculations. As it turns out, should our little matter reach the courts, chances are I would be so thoroughly drained of resources and so utterly humiliated by what would become of the scandal in the media, it would be impossible for me to go on according to the standards that I deem a life worth living. Although my occupation does not require the approval from the voting public like yours does, Jules, as a mental health practitioner, my standing with the public, to whom I appear first and foremost on the parody of reality that is the internet, is of utmost importance. No one wants to see photographs of their state-appointed grief counselor assisting his mutant son through a court battle against a man with the type of divisive media spectacle that has been bestowed upon your life, Jules. And so it is in both our interests to settle this matter my way, as I intend to do now — in an anonymous manuscript, protected by copyright and published in public view in some fashion.

To begin laying things out in what I hope are clear and legally binding terms, the essence of our agreement can be summarized as follows: I am attempting to pry the salacious slices of your person shared with this so-called Valerie from the very hands that could ruin your family as well as mine, by publishing this potential blackmail material and hiding it in plain sight in such a way that could never ever be attributed to you, Jules. The hands that the blackmail material must be pried from are, in fact, my son’s. In case you have not inferred by what I have thus far shared, this Valerie, the one with whom you spent much of the past year clearing away the brush obstructing your forbidden fountains, was in fact my son. Sorry if this news is disappointing, Jules, but you won’t be hearing from or seeing this so-called Valerie anymore. Valerie has vanished, and my son will no longer be able to conjure her with slutty prose or feminine accouterments. You will never truly know Valerie, because you will never find my son, nor hopefully want to after his trite art project that is endangering us all is laid to rest by what follows.

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