Honestly, I don't think I ever explored David's motivation for not staying around his brother. Guilt that he couldn't protect him, I think, is the most likely. The event was traumatizing to the characters in such a way that it stunted their relationships with each other, and thus they were driven apart by them -- I thought I'd captured that, but I guess it wasn't really sufficiently done.As for the recap ending, it just felt more natural that way. Keep in mind, from the beginning, I expected each of these characters to turn up again in later stories. So far, they've been mentioned, but I've never been able to come up with an organic story that encompasses any of them. I wanted an ending that left their strings out in the wind to some degree, so I could grab them and tie them back into a future story, but without just stopping in medias res and abandoning them there.That being said, looking at the main characters of each of my stories is like looking at a facet of me... they each have my mentality (to some degree), my thoughts, my vices, some of my interests, and generally act and react the way I would in a situation. Kyle was my innocence; Sean (Dear Diary) was my youthfulness and my youthful attitude towards love and romance; Damien (Frozen, LCoA, From Afar) was (and, in a way, is, since he's the one who keeps popping up) my more jaded and cynical side.