“Let that be your motivation, Knox.” She pulled back, smoothing down her scrubs like she hadn’t just turned my world inside out. “Be a good boy in that parole hearing.”
I opened my mouth to respond.
Holy shit. That’s why she talked dirty to me. To motivate me.
“You play dirty, Harper.”
“You need more of an incentive to cooperate with the parole board,” she said. “You think about my mouth. Wide open. Waiting for you to fill it.”
47
KNOX
Did I expect the parole board to actually grant me freedom today?
No.
Did I want it more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life?
Without question.
I’d spent fourteen years convincing myself that hope was a luxury I couldn’t afford. That wanting something only gave the universe permission to rip it away. So, I’d stopped hoping. Stopped dreaming. Stopped doing anything except existing, one gray day bleeding into the next.
Then Harper walked into my life and wrecked every wall I’d built.
She made me realize there could be a life beyond these walls. A future worth fighting for. And maybe, if I was lucky enough to earn it, that future would include not just her, but my daughter too.
Gwen hated me right now. I knew that. But Harper had taught me something else: Time wasn’t just a thief. It could also be a healer. With enough patience, enough love, maybe my relationship with my daughter wasn’t as doomed as it felt.
But the only way any of that happened was if I got the hell out of this prison.
And for the first time in fourteen years, I could almost taste what freedom felt like.
I still remembered that ambulance ride to Mercy Harbor. Not the details exactly. Those were fuzzy, lost somewhere between the blows to my skull and the fog of semi-consciousness. But I remembered the moment they lifted the stretcher out of the ambulance and wheeled me toward the emergency room doors.
For just a second, I’d looked up.
Clear sky. Actual clouds instead of concrete ceilings. Fresh air against my skin that didn’t smell like industrial cleaner and desperation. The sounds of cars and voices and life happening beyond the walls of this godforsaken place.
I had to get out of here.
Never before had I been so nervous about which way a parole hearing would go. Because after everything that had happened recently, I wasn’t sure I could survive another 365 days in this place.
Not without Harper.
And not without the chance to be a father again.
That’s why my heart was pounding loud enough to drown out the clinking of the shackles around my wrists and ankles as I shuffled into the hearing room. A small conference room located within the prison itself, it looked exactly like I remembered from my previous hearings: beige walls, fluorescent lighting that buzzed just loud enough to be annoying, and the faint smell of stale coffee and bureaucratic indifference.
A long rectangular table dominated the front of the room. Behind it sat three parole board members, each studying the stack of papers in front of them like those pages held the secrets of the universe instead of the details of my sorry life.
Papers with questions that would determine my future.
In front of them, rows of folding chairs, six deep. The cheap metal kind that squeaked against linoleum and left your ass numb after ten minutes.
I scanned the room as I shuffled in.
In the front row sat my sister, Dakota, my father, and in the aisle, my wheelchair-bound mother.
