“It’s not a love letter.”
“Does it sayI love youat the end?”
I said nothing.
“Hallmark dad,” Ronan confirmed with a smug nod. He tilted his chin toward the paper. “You gonna mail that one?”
The question hit harder than he probably intended. I looked down at the letter. The words I’d agonized over for the past hour. The penmanship I’d spent years improving, just in case.
“No.”
Ronan was quiet. Then: “Why do you write them every week if you never mail them?”
I finished the last line. Set the pen down. Folded the paper carefully, pressing the creases sharp.
Why did I write them?
Because words on a page were the only connection I had to my daughter. Because someday, maybe, she’d read them. Maybe she’d understand.
Maybe she’d forgive me.
I set the folded letter beneath my mattress and leaned back against the cold wall.
Ronan had called me the baddest motherfucker in this place. Ten minutes after that, he’d called me a Hallmark dad.
Both were true. That was the thing no one understood about me: I could be the most dangerous man in a room and still lose sleep over the right word in a letter to my kid.
And now there was a new contradiction I couldn’t explain: a woman who worked inside these walls, who should’ve looked at me and seen nothing but a killer, had instead looked at my hands and treated them like they were worth saving.
And damn if that didn’t do something to my ribs I couldn’t name. Couldn’t understand.
I pressed my thumb harder against the gauze until I felt the first stitch give.
Just one.
Just one. That was enough for now—but by morning, I’d have a reason to be back in her infirmary.
7
HARPER
The second day on the job, I discovered that the medical supply closet was past the inmate waiting area.
Of course it was.
Because nothing in this understaffed prison could ever be convenient or, you know,extra safe. The closet used to be next to the exam rooms, back when logic still existed, but overcrowding had transformed every spare inch into makeshift medical space.
I gripped my empty medical tray and headed out of the exam area, the door clicking locked behind me with a finality that made my stomach tighten. The CO behind the desk barely glanced up from his newspaper.
Two inmates slouched on the bench like they’d been poured there, all loose limbs and practiced boredom. The taller one was picking at something under his thumbnail with the dedication of someone who had nowhere else to be for the next five to ten years. His cellmate—I assumed they were cellmates by the way they sat with that particular brand of comfortable hostility—was staring at a water stain on the ceiling like it held the secrets of the universe.
Until I walked by.
Suddenly, they found religion. Or at least, they found something worth worshipping in the way my scrubs moved when I walked. The nail-picking stopped. The ceiling lost its appeal. I kept my spine straight, my pace steady, channeling every ounce of fake-it-till-you-make-it energy I’d cultivated since my first day yesterday.
Power, I reminded myself.You have the power here. Not them.
It was a nice theory. One I’d rehearsed in my bathroom mirror this morning while concealer worked overtime on the faint scar on my cheek.
