He’s quiet for a moment. “She sounds smart,” he says.
“She was,” I reply, a little too quickly. “Mostly.”
We trade small details at first, like tossing marbles back and forth, testing the weight of being together in person. We talk about our favorite books. I already know some from his letters,The Stand,Of Mice and Men,that beat-up copy ofThe Outsidershe reread until the cover fell off, but hearing him say the titles aloud feels different.
“What about you?” he asks. “You always mention poetry. Never said which ones.”
I make a face. “If I answer that honestly, you’re going to think I’m insufferable.”
“I already read your letters,” he points out. “The damage is done.”
I laugh, cheeks burning. “Okay, fine. I like Mary Oliver. And Ocean Vuong. And sometimes, when it’s really bad, I read the same Neruda poem ten times in a row like it’s going to fix anything.”
“Does it?” he asks.
“Sometimes.” I shrug. “Sometimes it just keeps me company while it’s broken.”
He nods slowly, like he understands that better than most. We talk about music we miss.
“Real guitars,” he says. “Not that polished auto-tuned stuff they blast in the yard sometimes. I miss songs with mistakes. You know? Fingers sliding on strings. Amp hum. That sort of thing.”
“What did you listen to before?” I ask.
He leans back a little, eyes drifting to the tree as he thinks. “Old rock. Some outlaw country. Whatever Cody put on, really. My brother had terrible taste.” His mouth lifts in a sad smile. “He’d play the same song on repeat until we all wanted to throw the stereo out the window.”
“You told me about him,” I say softly. “In your letter about the first time you saw snow.”
His jaw tightens a fraction, then loosens. “Yeah. He loved snow. Thought it was magic. I thought it was a pain in the ass.” He huffs. “Still do.”
I smile into my mug. “I kind of like it.”
“Of course you do,” he mutters. “You’re the kind of person who names plants and buys strangers compasses.”
I swat lightly at his knee with the back of my hand. “I do not name all my plants. Only some.”
He smirks, and the sight of it does something odd to my chest. “You still sing to them?” he asks. “You said you did. In one of your letters. When you couldn’t sleep.”
“Only the really sick ones,” I admit. “The others have to tough it out.”
He chuckles, the sound low and rough, like it’s rusty from disuse. “Lucky plants.”
We discover neither of us really likes peppermint.
“It tastes like brushing your teeth and then eating dessert immediately after,” I say with a shudder.
He grimaces. “They put it in everything in there this time of year. Candy canes in the cafeteria, peppermint cocoa. Like if they make it festive enough, you’ll forget you’re locked up.”
“Did it work?” I ask softly.
He looks at me, really looks, and shakes his head once. “No.”
We don’t talk about the night he saved me. Not at first. We don’t talk about prison or courts or the versions of ourselves the world reduced to headlines and file numbers. Not because those things don’t matter, but because they’ve taken up enough space already.
Right now, I want to exist somewhere else with him. In the small things. In the way his eyes crinkle when I say something sarcastic. In the way he leans in a little when I talk about my writing group, like he’s collecting names and details to keep later.
He tells me about his brother again, but with more detail now, about Cody’s obsession with terrible action movies, about how he’d sit too close to the TV and recite the lines before the characters did. I tell him about my mom, how she used to burn the first batch of cookies every year like a ritual, how she’d pretend it was on purpose, so we’d have “taste testers.”
He asks if I still sing to my plants. I say only the really sick ones. We both smile. It feels… easy. Easier than it should, given everything.
