“I already said it,” I’d muttered. “On paper.”
He’d sobered, nodding once. “Then say it again. With your life.”
That’s the conversation that echoes now, sitting on this thin mattress in this too-small space, my hands hanging between my knees. Say it again. With your life.
What the hell does that even mean?
I look up, eyes landing on the shelf I’ve half-bolted together above the bed. Three folded sets of clothes. A plastic cup. A few paperbacks, their spines broken from being read and re-read. The prison handbook with its missing page.
And her letters. They’re stacked neatly in the corner, folded back into their envelopes, edges soft from the number of times I’ve thumbed through them. The first few are thinner, shorter, and careful. As the weeks go by, they get longer. Looser. There are little doodles in the margins now, sometimes, a star, a cup of tea, a tiny snowman with a crooked smile when the weather turned.
I reach up and take the stack down, handling them more carefully than anything else I own. It’s funny. I’ve been locked up for months, surrounded by men twice my size, and the thing I’m most afraid of damaging is twenty sheets of paper written by a woman I’ve seen for maybe thirty seconds in my life.
I thumb through them, not really reading the words yet, just feeling the texture, scanning the familiar loops of her handwriting. Letters about her week. About the writing group she goes to on Thursdays, five of them in the back of an old library, sharing pages and tea and nerves. Letters about a plant she accidentally overwatered and then coaxed back to life, like it was a miracle. About the old lady downstairs who bakes too many cookies and insists on giving her some “because you’re too thin, dear.”
Little things. Ordinary things. The kind of things you stop noticing when your life is all crisis and fallout. Somewhere around the middle of the stack, there’s one smudged in the corner from where, she confessed in a postscript, she spilledcinnamon sugar while baking. My thumb always pauses there, presses into that faint, rough patch.
I find the last one and slide it free. I don’t need to check the date. I know it by heart. Two weeks ago. I reread her last letter. Not because I need to, but because I want to. Because her words have become the place I go when everything else feels too loud or too gray.
You said you don’t make plans anymore; she wrote. I get it. Plans feel dangerous. Like promises the world will laugh at. But if you get out before Christmas… I keep thinking about what that would look like. Where would you go first? What you’d want most. If you’re still reading my letters by then… maybe, you’ll want to find me.
And if you do… I think I’d say yes.
That line plays on a loop in my chest.Maybe you’ll want to find me. I think I’d say yes.I want to find her. More than I want anything. More than I want a decent steak or a real bed or a hot shower that doesn’t come with a time limit and a line of guys behind you.
I want to stand in front of her door, wherever it is, and see her safe with my own eyes without a chain around my ankle, without a guard two steps away, without the memory of snow and blood between us. I want to see what her face looks like when it’s not twisted in fear. I want to hear her voice when she’s not shouting.
But right behind that want is a weight. A voice that’s been with me longer than she has, settling into my bones like an old injury. The one that says I’m not the man she sees in those letters.
I’m not the protector or the poet or the soul with gravel and grief and good intentions. I’m just a guy with a record. With callused fists and bad decisions in his rearview. With a history of walking into the wrong fights and leaving too many things broken behind him.
What if she regrets it the second she sees me again?
What if all this connection we’ve built in ink and paper evaporates the moment she has to tilt her head back to meet my eyes, the moment she sees the scar, the moment she realizes I’m not just the guy from the letters—I’m the guy from her nightmares, too. The roar and the blood and the body slamming into the snow.
What if I walk up to her door and all she sees is what I used to be?
A threat.
A mistake.
A story she doesn’t want to tell anyone.
I scrub my palm over my face again, annoyed at myself for even letting this line of thought breathe.
She’s the one who asked me to find her. She’s the one who kept writing, letter after letter, even when I took too long to answer. She’s the one who told the cops the truth. The least I can do is be honest back. Still, my stomach knots. What does a man like me do with hope? I’ve never held it this long without dropping it.
My gaze drifts to the tiny window above the bed. The glass is old, warped, streaked with grime no one bothers to scrub. Through the bars, I can see a slice of sky, pale and flat in the afternoon light.
Somewhere out there, people are buying last-minute presents and arguing about turkeys. Somewhere, kids are writing lists and sticking them on fridges. Somewhere, someone is stringing up tinsel and muttering about how it always gets tangled.
Somewhere out there, she’s living her life. Going to the library. Watering her plants. Baking cinnamon rolls when she can’t sleep. And she’s thinking about a man in a cell. About me.
I put the letter down in my lap and reach under the mattress for the pencil and the handbook again. I pull another blank page from the back, careful not to rip it jaggedly, smoothing it against my thigh.
My hand hovers. I don’t know how to say everything I’m thinking. I don’t have the words for the way her letters have taken all the empty hours and given them a shape. For how they’ve stitched something back together inside me, I thought was past repair. So, I don’t try to say all of it. I start where I can.
M,
