THE RECORD OF WHAT IT COST

Unsent letters of love, labor, and consequence

Some books tell a story. This one tells the truth.

The Record of What It Cost is a curated archive of unsent letters written from the places we don’t post, don’t say out loud, and don’t admit until the room is empty. It’s not a tidy memoir and it isn’t fiction in disguise. It’s a ledger. A witness statement. A record of what tenderness demanded and what survival collected.

Across five heat-marked sections: The Lover, The Kin, The Betrayed, The Hustler, and The Lightkeeper.  Omari Vale traces the emotional math of becoming a person again. The arc moves from romantic ruin and inheritance wounds to betrayal, street-level consequence, and the quieter work of rebuilding. Each letter reads like a room you can step into, and each section is designed to be read straight through or opened at the exact page your life needs.

In The Lover, desire is both refuge and fire. Love is measured in what we excuse, what we tolerate, and what we call “patience” when it’s really fear of being left.

In The Kin, the family you came from explains the hunger you carry. Fathers who stayed half-present. Mothers who worked themselves into legend. The inheritance of approval, absence, and the strange grief of loving people who never learned how to hold you.

In The Betrayed, disappointment turns into a teacher. Not just betrayal by others, but the betrayal of self—staying too long, shrinking needs, begging for lies you already knew were lies.

In The Hustler, survival has a price tag. Here, the writing turns gritty and percussive, with credited contributions from Alonzo J. Crippen, a sharp disruption in voice that brings the street closer, the stakes higher, and the moral pressure louder. This section doesn’t romanticize the grind. It inventories it.

And in The Lightkeeper, the book refuses easy closure. The ending isn’t a victory lap, it’s maintenance. A steadier, honest kind of hope that doesn’t require pretending you weren’t hurt.

This collection is emotionally direct, lyrical without being decorative, and built for rereading. The structure includes reader guidance and “reading paths,” so you can follow the book by theme love, family, betrayal, hustle, healing, or simply begin where your own life has left you.

This book is for anyone who has ever:

• paid in silence and called it love

• survived a family that didn’t know how to hold them

• hardened after betrayal and missed their softness anyway

• carried ambition like a prayer and exhaustion like a wage

• needed proof that they aren’t the only one who feels like this

The Record of What It Cost doesn’t offer performance. It offers presence. It doesn’t promise to fix you. It promises to name what happened—cleanly, bravely, and without flinching.

Open it anywhere.

Start with what hurts.

Let the record tell the truth back to you.