“How do you plead?” The judge asked.
“Guilty,” I said with my head held high.
Then he told me my sentence.
Two Days Later
“I told you he didn’t do anything to me that I hadn’t asked him to,” she sneered at me.
“So, you're telling me that when I heard you screaming in fear, telling him no and to stop, that you wanted it to be like that?” I asked.
She nodded, “Yeah. We don’t live under a rock, Michael. Ever heard of role-playing?” she asked sarcastically.
“Watch your mouth,” I growled.
She scoffed, “I’ll watch my mouth the day you stop acting like my dad.”
I didn’t let it show, but her words pierced something in my chest.
Age 17
One more year.
Age 18
“Want to join the motorcycle club we’re starting?” the boy known as Kase asked.
I shrugged, “Got nothin’ else to do.”
Age 20
As soon as I got the address from Merlin, I walked out of the clubhouse, strode to my bike, started it up, and made the two-hour journey to New Orleans.
Then I looked up at the house and waited.
The house wasn’t fancy in any sense. It was a standard brick two-story with white columns, like a lot of homes in New Orleans seemed to be.
An hour later, I watched as a little boy who had Kacie’s dirty blonde hair smiled widely as he clutched a stuffed dinosaur in his hand.
My god but he was beautiful.
Something in my chest squeezed.
And when he laughed just now... I wanted to bottle that sound up so I could hear it whenever I wanted to.
He was laughing at a woman’s side. It was the same woman who had taken him from the hospital the day he was born.
The image of a perfect little boy was seared into my very marrow.
Thankfully, I had gotten to hold him for two minutes before the social worker was there to take him from my arms and place him in the woman’s arms who had adopted him.
It’s been one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days since I last saw him.
His sixth birthday was tomorrow.
I waited until they left to pull the bag out of my saddlebags and walked up their front walk.
Then I set the bag with the colorful balloons and blue tissue paper on their steps and walked back to my bike.
