But now Gwen was eighteen. My ex no longer held the controls. And that terrified me more than any inmate in this place ever could.
Chances were, Gwen would want nothing to do with me.
Hell, I had no idea what my ex had told her about me. Did Gwen think I didn’t fight to see her? Did she think that when I reluctantly, painfully accepted my ex’s begging to stopcontacting them so Gwen could have a chance at a normal life, I hadn’t spent that next year existing like a zombie?
I’d thought about fighting my ex on it. Figured Gwen would need a father, inmate or not. She at least deserved to know her father wanted her.
But then I thought about the life of a little girl. Barbies and bike rides. Running through the sprinkler, the water creating rainbows against the sun. Pink outfits and pigtails. Later, slumber parties and braces.
And then I pictured that same girl having to drive all the way to Coldwater Penitentiary. A dark concrete cancer of a building. Going through security checkpoints, being stared at by rapists and pedophiles and abusers in the visiting room. And for what?
So I could get to spend time with her?
How fucking selfish of me.
Still, it took me a long time to finally let her go. And once I did, I cried myself to sleep every night.
I know. What a tough guy, eh?
Looking back, I know that’s when I changed. I used to be softer. Believe it or not, I wasn’t born a hardened asshole who never smiled. I transformed into him.
Losing my daughter was a disease that infected my body, causing cellular death at every level. My lungs cycled air differently, like the bronchial tubes had permanently narrowed. My gut churned food into poison. And my vision changed. It stopped processing colors anymore. Everything was just different shades of dark.
Even still, I wouldn’t change it. I’d gladly sign up for hell on earth again, every single day, if it meant saving my little girl.
But now that little girl had turned eighteen.
Sometimes, late at night, my mind wandered to dark places. I’d imagine the milestones in Gwen’s life that I had been absent from. Gwen at sixteen, getting her driver’s license. Gwen atprom, spinning in some dress I’d never see. Gwen graduating high school, throwing her cap into the air.
And in every single one of those images, she was smiling. Not thinking about me. Not missing me. Not wondering where I was or wishing I could be there.
While she was the sun in my solar system, I feared I was nothing more than a speck in her universe that she never thought about.
And that? That fucking gutted me, imagining I was simply forgotten. A stain they’d scrubbed from their existence.
I hated myself for that pain. It was selfish. Only a terrible father would hurt at the thought of her moving on with her life without him. I wanted my daughter to thrive. It was the whole purpose of letting her go to begin with.
And yet I guess it was part of being human. When you love someone that much, it felt like someone was dragging a blade across my chest every time I pictured her living without a second thought to me.
When Harper suggested I reach out to Gwen, hope took off in my chest like a bird escaping a cage. Maybe it was time to actually mail one of my letters. Maybe I could see my kid again. Maybe I could find out what her life was like. Was she going to college? Did she have lots of friends? What career did she want? Did she still have that dimple on the right side of her mouth that was the cutest fucking thing I’d ever seen?
Did she remember me? Did she want me to reach out to her? Or would she slam the door in my face?
Worse. Would she feel no emotion at all?
My damn eyes burned at that thought.
But Harper was right. Gwen deserved to know she had a father who loved her and wanted her. And if she wanted nothing to do with me, I’d have to find a way to accept that.
But at least she’d know she was loved.
Sighing, I sat in the prison computer lab, second-guessing if sending an email rather than a letter was the right way to contact her. A letter would be something she could hold in her hand, but with the prison mail room having to intercept and read it, with how slow and potentially unreliable the post office was, I couldn’t live forever, not knowing if she ever even got it.
So, an email it was.
A row of ancient monitors lined the wall, each one bolted to a desk that had seen better decades. The chair groaned beneath me as I leaned forward, staring at the login screen.
Behind me, Officer Daniels sat at a monitoring station, his eyes flicking between his own screen and the backs of our heads. Every email we sent got filtered through the prison’s system first. Read. Flagged if necessary. Approved or rejected before it ever reached the outside world.
