You’re six foot four. Covered in tattoos. A convicted killer. A badass motherfucker who made grown men back down with a look.
Get your shit together.
“Oh, and in your email, you asked about this.” She reached into the bag and set a ratty, pale-pink elephant on my lap. “Of course I kept it, Dad. I kept everything you ever gave me.”
The air left my lungs.
I picked it up with both hands. One ear was nearly detached. The pink had faded to something closer to gray, the fabric worn thin in patches. Rubbed smooth over years, like she’d loved the color right out of it.
I’d been so worried she’d thrown it away. But she’d kept it this whole time. By the looks of it, slept with it every night for years.
My throat locked. I pressed my thumb into the worn patch once, twice, the texture burning itself into my fingerprint like something I needed to memorize and keep.
“Gwen …”
“I love you, Dad.”
Four words. Simple. Devastating.
They unlocked something in my chest that I’d kept chained for fourteen years.
“And I got you one more thing,” she added.
She pulled out another scrapbook.
Yellow.
Blank.
“Yellow’s my new favorite color,” she explained. “I thought we could fill this one together. Wednesday dinners. Holidays. All of it. No more waiting for the right moment.”
And that was it.
Six foot four. Two hundred forty pounds of muscle. Tattoos crawling up my neck. A man who’d survived prison without breaking.
I cried like a little boy.
Gwen leaned forward and wrapped her arms around me, careful of the wires and the monitors and all the ways I was held together by medical tape and stubbornness.
“It’s okay, Dad,” she whispered. “We have time now.”
I held on to her like she was the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth. I had time now. Time to share memories and create scrapbooks and learn all the things I’d missed.
Time to be her dad.
65
KNOX
SINNERS AND SAINTS GROUP CHAT
Blake: Knox, how are you feeling?
Me: Fine.
Axel: “Fine,” he says. The man had his skull cracked open like a coconut, and he says FINE.
Jace: You did have a significant fracture.
