And I hadn’t been there for any of it.
I forced my legs to move. One step. Then another. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the room smelled like industrial cleaner and burnt coffee. Stale. Lifeless. No place for someone like her.
Her gaze flicked to my face, and I watched her catalog the damage. The swollen eye. The split in my lip.
She winced. Just barely. Then smoothed her expression into something carefully neutral.
“Gwendolyn,” I said.
“Gwen.” The correction was quiet. Tired. A wall wrapped in one syllable.
I absorbed the hit. Sat down across from her. Let the silence stretch while I studied this stranger who shared my blood. She had her arms folded across her chest, spine pressed against the back of her chair like she was trying to put as much distance between us as physically possible.
“I appreciate you coming to see me.”
She studied me for a long moment. Not with hatred. With something worse.
Curiosity. Like I was a stranger she was trying to place.
The thing about prison was, it gave you plenty of time to think. To fantasize. I’d spent countless nights imagining this moment. Her running into my arms. Sunday dinners. Birthday parties. Photo albums spread across a kitchen table while she walked me through every moment I’d missed. I’d imagined her voice. Her laugh. The way she might look at me like I still mattered.
Naive. Childish. The dreams of a man desperate enough to believe he hadn’t already lost everything.
Reality, as it turned out, didn’t give a damn about my fantasies.
“So?” Gwen’s voice cut through my thoughts. “You said you wanted to see me. I’m here.”
I scrubbed a hand over my stubbled jaw. Truthfully, my best-case scenario with sending that email was that she might email me back. Letting myself hope she might actually want to come here, to see me in person, was too much to bear. And now that she was here, words seemed to fail me.
So, I started with something smaller, something that wouldn’t put too much stress on her. “I wanted to know how you’re doing. How your life is going.”
“You wanted to know.” She repeated the words slowly, like she was testing their weight. “After ten years of silence.”
“Gwen …”
“I’m not trying to fight with you.” Her voice wavered, just slightly. “I just … I need to understand something first.”
I waited.
“Why?” The word came out fractured. “Why didn’t you call? Or write? I waited, you know. Every birthday. Every Christmas. I’d check the mailbox like it was some kind of ritual.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Mom finally told me to stop. Said you’d moved on.”
The lie hit me like a fist to the chest. Moved on. Like I hadn’t spent every single day in this hellhole thinking about her. Like I hadn’t begged her mother for updates, for photos, for anything.
Like I hadn’t been told, over and over, that a clean break was best. That my voice would only confuse her. That she was finally adjusting and I’d ruin it if I reached out.
I’d believed it. God help me, I’d believed it because believing it was easier than fighting a war I couldn’t win from behind bars.
“Your mother thought …” I started, then stopped. What was the point? Blaming her mother wouldn’t give Gwen her childhood back. Wouldn’t undo the damage.
“Mom thought what?”
I pressed my tongue against my molars. “She thought you needed stability. A fresh start. And I …” The words tasted like ash. “I let her make that call.”
Gwen’s brow furrowed. “You let her? You’re telling me you wanted to be in my life, but you just … didn’t fight for it?”
“I fought.” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “At first, I fought. But I was in here, and she was out there, raising you.”
She huffed, offended. “You expect me to believe that?”
