Kai
The floor is cold enough to seep into my bones, concrete biting through the thin fabric of the prison issue trousers until my knees ache and my spine feels like it’s grinding itself down to dust. I sit there anyway. Back against the bed. Legs bent. Head tipped forward like I’m praying to something I stopped believing in a long time ago.
The letters are everywhere.
Not neatly stacked. Not organised. I don’t treat them gently anymore. They’re scattered across the floor in a mess of white and creased corners, envelopes split open and torn apart, paper folded and unfolded so many times the words have started to ghost through from the other side.
RETURN TO SENDER.
RETURN TO SENDER.
RETURN TO SENDER.
Stamped in red. Over and over. Like a verdict that never stopped being read.
I pick one up and smooth it out with my thumb, slow, reverent, like if I touch it just right the ink might bleed back into something alive.
My handwriting stares up at me. Tight. Controlled. Careful. The kind of writing that pretends the man holding the pen isn’t unraveling at the edges.
Scarlett.
I always start with her name. Every letter. Every time. As if that one word is enough to tether me to the world outside these walls. As if saying it enough times might drag her back to me by sheer force of will.
My mouth moves silently, shaping it again now.
Scarlett.
I laugh under my breath. It comes out wrong. Cracked. There’s no humour in it. Just pressure.
“You kept them,” I mutter to the empty cell, to the concrete, to the cameras that pretend they aren’t watching. “You read them. You fucking had to.”
I know she did.
She can pretend she didn’t. She can swear she never opened a single one, that she sent them back unopened, untouched, unread, but I know her better than that. I know the way her fingers linger. I know how she can’t leave things unfinished. I know how guilt chews at her until she bleeds.
She read them.
She just couldn’t face answering.
I drag a hand down my face, palm rough against my skin, fingers catching in the stubble I stopped caring about months ago. My eyes burn, but I don’t blink. I won’t give my body the satisfaction of breaking without permission.
Four years.
Four years of steel bars and concrete and men who think violence makes them powerful. Four years of nights spent staring at the underside of a bunk, replaying the same moment over and over until it’s carved into me deeper than any scar.
Her in the courtroom.
Her voice.
Not shaking.
That’s the part that still gets me.
She didn’t shake.
She stood there in that borrowed dress, hands folded like she was bracing herself against the truth, eyes forward, chin lifted, and she lied about me like it was nothing. Like I wasn’t sitting ten feet away, wrists chained, chest wide open.
He killed him in cold blood.
