“You told everyone three days,” Dad groans, without looking at him.
“Two to three. There was a range.” Deek tilts his head at me. “You’re in the two-day window. I was right.”
I look at my brother and feel something warm move through me that has nothing to do with hope or relief and everything to do with the simple, steady fact of him being him. His jaw is tight, his eyes are brighter than usual in the way they get when he’s feeling something too large for a joke to contain fully. He’s here because he cannot not be in here with me, and we both know that, but neither of us will say it.
“Go home tonight,” I tell Dad, knowing he’s probably been waiting out in the lobby of the damn police department.
He looks at me with the exact expression I expected, which is none at all.
“Dad.” I hold his gaze. “I’m okay. Go home.”
His jaw moves slightly. He doesn’t agree, and he doesn’t argue, which is the closest thing to a concession I’m going to get from him, and I know it.
Deek puts a hand briefly on Dad’s shoulder. “I’ll make him eat something,” he says, in my direction.
“He’ll try,” Dad says.
Two sharp raps land against the metal frame, which carry more authority than volume.
“Time.” The guard doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to.
My father’s shoulders shift almost imperceptibly as he pushes back from the table. The chair legs scrape across the concrete, a small, ordinary sound that somehow feels final. He straightens his cut the way he always does before stepping into something he can’t control, fingers smoothing fabric that doesn’t need smoothing.
For a second, he stands there.
Then he steps closer to the glass.
I follow without thinking. The phone cord swings lightly between us, forgotten. The scratched plexiglass blurs the edges of his face, but not the steadiness in his eyes—that never blurs—and we hold each other’s gaze.
There are a thousand things that could be said. Apologies, reassurances, plans. None of them makes it past the tight, controlled space between my ribs.
His hand lifts first, palm flat against the glass.
I match it.
The barrier is cold.
He gives a single, small nod. The kind he’s always given me when something needed to be understood without discussion.
I return it before I even realize I’ve decided to.
The guard clears his throat softly.
My father lowers his hand, turns, and walks toward the door without looking back. The fluorescent light catches briefly on the silver in his hair before he disappears into the corridor.
The room feels larger once he’s gone.
I stay there a second too long, my hand still resting against the place his had been until the guard shifts his weight and gestures toward the door. “Let’s go.”
I push back from the table. The chair legs scrape, louder this time in the emptied room. The corridor outside is colder than I remember, the fluorescent lights harsher after the dim hum of the visitation booth. My shoes echo on concrete as we walk, the sound of it sharp and unfamiliar in a place where time feels measured in footsteps and locked doors.
We pass two turns, a set of barred gates that open and close with a mechanical finality. Other faces glance up as we move through—some are curious, and some are already bored with the spectacle of another man in transit.
My cell waits exactly where I left it.
The guard steps aside, I go in, and the door shuts with a heavy, practiced certainty that leaves no room for interpretation. I sit on the narrow bunk and let the moment catch up to me.
Lights-down comes later, announced by a flicker and the slow dimming of the overheads. The building doesn’t fall silent. Distant footsteps, the steady hum of ventilation, a voice somewhere down the corridor, rising and falling in a language I don’t follow. But it’s quiet enough now that my thoughts have space to move without colliding.
