Chapter 1: The Royal Throat

The nickname stuck because of the way Elias ate—or rather, didn't eat. "Truffle Pig" they called him at the docks, watching him sniff around the galley like he was hunting for something precious buried in the slop. The crew of the Mary Catherine found it hilarious that their skinniest deckhand could identify every ingredient in the cook's mystery stew just by smell.

"What's in it today, Ruff?" Stevey would ask, using the shortened version of "Truffle" that had somehow become Elias's real name to everyone who mattered.

Elias would close his green eyes, inhale deeply, and rattle off the contents: "Potatoes, carrots, some kind of white fish—probably cod—bay leaves, too much salt, and..." He'd pause, concentrating. "Did Cookie use garlic powder or fresh?"

"Fresh," Cookie would confirm from the galley window, shaking his head in amazement. "Kid's got a nose like a bloodhound."

It was a party trick that made the other deckhands laugh, made them slap his back and call him their secret weapon. What they didn't know was that it wasn't just a game for Elias. It was survival—the only way he could participate in the ritual of meals without actually eating.

While the others wolfed down their portions, Elias would sip his liquid meal from a thermos, the thin gruel sliding down his throat with practiced ease. Twenty-seven years of achalasia had taught him to find joy in the periphery of food, in its smells and sounds and the warm camaraderie that surrounded it. He'd learned to laugh when the others joked about his "fancy diet" and to deflect their concern with humor.

"Royal throat," he'd tell them, affecting a posh accent. "Too refined for peasant food."

But the truth was darker and more mundane. His esophagus was a broken gate that wouldn't open, a muscular knot that had sentenced him to a life of liquid nutrition and careful swallowing. His mother, Eleonora, had explained it to him when he was old enough to understand: a birth defect, rare and incurable. The feeding tubes, the pureed meals, the careful positioning during sleep—all necessary accommodations for a body that had forgotten how to perform its most basic function.

The photograph on his nightstand showed her holding him as an infant, her punk-rock haircut defiant even as exhaustion shadowed her eyes. A heavy bandage wrapped her arm and shoulder, and Elias had always wondered about that injury. She'd never explained it, just like she'd never explained why she'd raised him alone, working double shifts at the cannery to afford his medical bills.

She'd been dead three months now, and the grief still ambushed him at unexpected moments. Like when he opened his thermos and caught a whiff of the vanilla protein shake that reminded him of the chalky taste of childhood medicines. Like when he passed the diner where she used to pick up extra shifts, its windows now papered with "For Lease" signs.

The Mary Catherine had become his refuge from the hollow ache of her absence. Hard work, salt air, and the rough brotherhood of men who didn't ask too many questions about his past. Stevey, especially, had a gift for knowing when to crack a joke and when to let the silence stretch between them as they worked.

"Storm's coming in," Stevey said, squinting at the horizon where gray clouds gathered like a fist. "Captain wants us to run back early."

Elias nodded, securing the clam rake against the gunwale. The wind had picked up, sending spray across the deck, and the boat pitched more aggressively with each wave. Around them, the other boats in the small fleet were already turning toward shore, their engines growling against the rising chop.

The drive back to the harbor was routine—thirty minutes of diesel rumble and the hypnotic slap of waves against the hull. Elias found himself thinking about his mother again, about the strange dreams he'd been having since her funeral. Dreams where she stood at the foot of his bed, her mouth moving urgently, trying to tell him something he couldn't quite hear.

He was still lost in that reverie when the pickup truck ran the red light.

The impact folded Stevey's old Ford like origami, metal screaming against metal as they spun across the intersection. Elias felt his body slam against the passenger door, then whip back as the truck rolled once, twice, before settling with a groaning finality against a telephone pole.

Time fractured. There was blood in his mouth, the sharp taste of copper. His left leg was twisted at an impossible angle, bone visible through torn denim. Stevey was slumped over the steering wheel, unmoving, and panic clawed at Elias's throat as he tried to call his friend's name.

The ambulance arrived in a symphony of sirens and flashing lights. Paramedics swarmed the wreckage, their voices sharp with medical urgency. "Two victims, one unconscious, possible head trauma." "This one's got a compound fracture of the tibia, possible internal bleeding."

The ride to the hospital was a blur of pain medication and concerned faces hovering over him. They asked him questions he couldn't focus on, took vitals that seemed to belong to someone else's body. Somewhere in another ambulance, he hoped Stevey was getting the help he needed.

Emergency surgery followed—a steel rod inserted into his shattered leg, plates and screws to hold the pieces together. When he woke in recovery, groggy and disoriented, a doctor with kind eyes and graying temples was reviewing his chart.

"Mr. Vance? I'm Dr. Patricia Henley, your orthopedic surgeon. The surgery went well, and we expect a full recovery with physical therapy."

Elias tried to speak, but his throat felt raw from the intubation. The doctor noticed his struggle and handed him a cup of ice chips.

"I know this might be difficult, but I need to discuss your medical history with you. When you were brought in, we ran a full workup including an upper GI series because of the trauma to your abdomen."

She paused, consulting the chart again, and something in her expression made Elias's stomach clench with dread.

"Mr. Vance, according to your medical records, you've been living with achalasia since infancy. Is that correct?"

He nodded, confused by the question's obvious answer.

Dr. Henley set down the chart and looked at him directly. "I've reviewed your scans multiple times, and I've consulted with our gastroenterology team. Your esophageal function appears completely normal. The lower esophageal sphincter is working perfectly, and there's no evidence of the muscular dysfunction that characterizes achalasia."

The words hit him like a physical blow. "That's... that's impossible. I've had this condition my entire life."

"I understand this must be shocking," Dr. Henley said gently. "Medical misdiagnosis, especially in childhood, is more common than we'd like to admit. Sometimes symptoms that appear to be one condition are actually caused by something else entirely—stress, anxiety, even learned behaviors that become deeply ingrained."

Elias stared at her, his world tilting off its axis. Twenty-seven years of liquid meals, of watching others eat while he sat on the sidelines, of thinking his body was fundamentally broken—all based on a lie?

"Are you saying I can eat normally?"

"Based on these scans, there's no physical reason why you couldn't." She hesitated. "Though after so many years of restricted eating, you'd need to reintroduce solid foods very gradually, under medical supervision. Your digestive system has essentially been dormant."

The room seemed to spin around him. Everything he thought he knew about himself, about his limitations, about the careful choreography of his daily life—all of it crumbling in the space of a single conversation.

Dr. Henley continued talking about supervised feeding protocols and gradual dietary changes, but her words faded into background noise. Elias was remembering his mother's face in that old photograph, the exhaustion and determination in her eyes, the mysterious bandage on her arm.

Had she known? Had she deliberately kept him from eating, and if so, why?

"You don't have achalasia," Dr. Henley was saying, her voice seeming to come from very far away. "You never have."

The words hung in the air like a death sentence for everything he'd believed about himself. Outside his hospital window, the world continued unchanged—cars moving through traffic, people walking on sidewalks, living their normal lives while his reality collapsed into something unrecognizable.

Somewhere down the hall, a patient was laughing at something on television. The sound felt obscene in the face of his revelation, too bright and cheerful for a moment that felt like dying and being reborn simultaneously.

His mother's face smiled at him from the nightstand photograph, keeping her secrets even in death, leaving him alone with questions that might never have answers and a hunger he was only beginning to understand.