I squeezed his hand. “I want to. I want to meet your family.”
He shook his head and looked down at our joined hands.
“What?” I asked. “Talk to me.”
“It’s just another shitty thing for you to have to experience,” he said. “And this one’s because of me.”
“It’s not shitty. I mean, okay, jail is probably shitty, but not the way you mean. It’s just part of life, and life is messy and complicated. So are people. I’m not some princess you have to protect from that. I’ve seen it for myself.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He just looked into my eyes until I felt like I was falling into his. “I really love you, little bird, you know that?”
“I really love you too.” I really, really meant it.
We entered the building and lined up behind some other people who seemed to be there for visiting day. I was nervous, not because we were at a jail but because I was meeting more of Poe’s family.
When we got to the front of the line, Poe gave a middle-aged lady with tight black curls and bored expression his name. Then he turned to me.
“This is Maeve Killborn, my wife.”
I coughed, choking on my own spit, and the lady looked up at me with concern. “You okay?”
“Yeah… I’m… fine,” I choked out.
His wife?
She checked me off her list and waved us through.
“Your wife?” I hissed.
He shrugged. “It was the only way I could get you in on such short notice. Besides, I kind of like the sound of it.”
I kind of liked the sound of it too, which was insane considering a year ago I’d been a twenty-one-year-old community college graduate with a retail job whose sole purpose in life was vengeance.
I wasn’t equipped to be someone’swife.
We stored our stuff in lockers, including my purse and our phones, and then we were led into a windowless room with the kinds of plastic tables and chairs we’d had in the Lushberry break room and two vending machines, one filled with soda, the other with snacks.
A uniformed guard leaned against one wall, his posture relaxed but his gaze watchful, and several other visitors had already claimed seats at some of the tables.
“Where do we sit?” I asked.
“Wherever,” Poe said. “I’m going to grab Whit something from the vending machine. Gran’s orders.”
I chose a table and sat while Poe fed his bank card into the vending machine. Other visitors wandered in, a couple of them with children, and my heart clenched in my chest. Losing June had just about broken me, but I wasn’t the only one in the world who’d lost something.
Maybe it should have made me depressed to realize how much loss, how much sorrow, there as in the world, but instead it made me feel less alone. Everyone had bad stuff to deal with at one time or another, and it felt meaningful to realize that somehow we all managed to muddle our way through it.
Poe returned to the table with a Mountain Dew and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos just as a loud electronic bell rang through the complex. Beyond the room, metal clanged and footsteps sounded on the linoleum floors.
Then the door opened and a guard entered the room leading a line of men in orange jumpsuits. One of the kids in the room, a blond-haired little girl of about five years old carrying a Barbie, exclaimed, “Daddy!”
The room was filled with the sights and sounds of reunion: smiles, tears, and even some laughter.
But not everyone was happy.
A girl about my age with dark hair and a tear-stained face sat quietly as a scrawny tattooed guy not much older than me sat across from her at one of the tables. A few tables away, a man in his forties didn’t get up as his younger mirror image approached.
I guess we were in the second category of people, the ones who weren’t happy, because Poe didn’t get up when a tall, slender dark-haired man approached. I knew immediately he was Poe’s brother. He had Poe’s dark blue eyes, his sharp nose and cheekbones.
