In a Greyhound bathroom in Tucson with my head against the wall.
Every night in a bed in Marie Kincaid's spare room with the door open, because I can't sleep with a closed door anymore.
I built it hard, built it right, and what I built is nothing, really. That's the plan. I will give him nothing.
He gets to the gate and puts one hand on it. "Ma'am."
It's his voice.
His actual voice, out of his actual mouth, in the air, and it goes into me sideways like a splinter under a nail and I don’t move.
He tips his head toward the buildings without taking his eyes off me. "It's forty degrees. Whatever this is, you're not doing it out here."
He doesn't know.
He's looking right at me and he doesn't know, and I feel my lips press flat because of course he doesn't.
I've seen what's in the mirror at Marie's.
There's a woman in there with my mother's cheekbones and my father's chin, and she's forty pounds lighter than she should be, with gray under the eyes and her hair's coming in wrong at the temple where men pulled it out time and time again.
I look at him.
I take my time about it. Ten years. I want all of it.
His face is the same and it isn't.
Lines coming in around the eyes. A scar through his eyebrow that wasn't there when I knew every millimeter of that face in the dark.
His mouth is the same, and it's the most obscene sight of my life, that it gets to keep existing, that it's been out here in the world this whole time doing whatever it wanted.
Then it happens.
It comes up through him like water finding a crack.
His eyes go wrong first.
Then his fingers hook into the wire, and his knuckles go white and yellow, and his mouth opens and shuts and produces nothing.
He makes a sound.
I've heard a lot of sounds.
I heard a man make one like that once when they brought him out to the yard for something I never learned the name of, and I've spent years not remembering it.
It comes out of Finn Kincaid on a Wednesday, and I have to stand here and hear it.
His eyes are wet.
They're wet and he's not doing one thing about it.
He's not turning. He's not wiping. He's standing in a road holding a fence with both hands now, both of them, coming apart in front of a cartel man, God, and me, and the water goes down his face into his beard.
Ten years, and he's crying at a gate.
Nothing. I give him nothing. My hands stay where they are and my face stays where it is, and my jaw is locked so tight I'll feel it tomorrow, and he doesn't get one flicker.
"Mila."
