I sniff. “I lied about spending Christmas with my dad. He died two years ago of a heart attack while he was in prison. You and I agreed early on that we’d never press, never ask anything of each other, but it isn’t enough for me. You didn’t ask for this, but someone has to know me, and like the lonely idiot that I am, I put all my eggs in your basket—both versions of you. I’d say it’s because I travel so much for work, which I do. But the real reason is that I’m afraid I’m not good enough for anyone to choose me. So I picked a career where I can help others but where I can never create lasting bonds.”
I draw in a breath, and the words become a text. I don’t bother proofreading. I just hit the microphone again.
“I’m a sentencing advocate for the people you resent most. I present reasons to judges why someone who committed a crime should get a reduced or alternative sentence. I know that goes against everything that matters to you—we both know how you love yourself some justice, the harsher the better.
“But what IS justice?”
I laugh. “You’d say, ‘If you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime.’ That’s not the whole story.”
I swallow hard, knowing I’m not helping my case, but I understand his point all too well. It’s time someone—anyone—understood mine.
“One of the first cases I ever worked on was as an intern for this man who sucker-punched a guy outside a bar. That guy gota TBI and it ended his career. Changed his life completely. What my client did was wrong. Period.
“The family of the victim wanted him in prison for the maximum sentence, which I get. But I related more with the client than I did with the victim—a privileged athlete from a wealthy family who wanted to put a man away without even acknowledging their son was the one who picked the fight.” I think about Darren, the way he seemed so intimidating on the outside but had such a soft, damaged heart. I remember the interviews with his teachers, his school counselor. And I think about Oliver and his family in the courtroom, not that I knew any of them then. All I saw were beautiful, wealthy people with perfect posture, expensive clothes, and too much pain to consider mercy.
“Your family didn’t know he came from an abusive home or that he escaped when he was fourteen and lived on the streets through high school. He found work at a chop shop at fifteen and learned his way around tools until he was able to start a handyman business. They had no idea.”
Even now, I ache for all the tragic parts of Darren’s story I’m leaving out, horrors too personal for me to divulge. “Darren was with his fiancée that night, and you know the facts: Evan was drunk and loud, taunting both of them. Scaring her. He didn’t know her last boyfriend was abusive. He didn’t know he was triggering very deep, very real trauma in them both. Darren and his girlfriend had a two year-old and she was pregnant again. He was the sole provider.
“Darren was already on high alert. He’d been hurt so much in his life. His girlfriend had been hurt so much. He wasn’t going to let this rich boy bragging about the millions he was going to make in the majors hurt them. He had no idea that if Evan swung first, the law would see it differently …”
I pause, wanting to cry for Darren, but for Evan, too. Both men’s lives were changed that night.
The truck heater rattles, echoing the feeling of my heart rattling in my otherwise empty chest. “I spent months working on his case. I interviewed the people he worked with as well as people he grew up with. Old teachers and current friends. His girlfriend. And the story was clear: he was a good guy who had pulled himself out of hell, but some demons clung to him.”
“I know you disagree, but I couldn’t see a world where Darren needed prison. He needed help. Anger management.Intensetrauma therapy. And he absolutely needed probation and community service. No question. But the stats are crystal clear: prison in cases like his rarely lead to reform, only to recidivism. Who would that serve? It wouldn’t give Evan his life back. It wouldn’t provide for Darren’s family. I ached for him, like I ache for Evan. But you didn’t see Darren sobbing when I interviewed him, crying that he had never once been violent in all the years since he left home, not after everything that happened to him on the streets. But now, he was just like his father.”
Tears run down my face in a stream. “Helping him healed something in me. Helping people became my whole identity. My duty. My privilege.
“I’ve seen countless people in desperate need of help over the years.”
I pause, trying to gather my strength. Trying to take a deep enough breath for what comes next. “And I’m one of them.” A cry escapes my throat, and I swallow it down.
“I’m alone and struggling, Oliver. I’m at a party celebrating what would have been my dad’s release, and almost no one is here, because what’s to celebrate in a man who gambled and stole, destroyed his family, and then who backslid in prison?” My throat throbs with the effort to keep my sobs down.
“This won’t surprise you, but because I’m me, I hitched my wagon to my dad’s, too. I’ve avoided my mom for years, because I thought it would be disloyal to my dad.” I sniff. “I’m such an idiot. But what can I say? I have a thing for emotionally unavailable men.”
I send the messages with a sniff. I wipe my face, even as I press the microphone one more time. “I need you, Arrow. Oliver. You’re on right now.I can see it.I cannot go on like this. If you care even an iota about me, I need you. You have five minutes to respond. If not, I’m deleting the app.
“Whatever happens, thanks for being a friend. And I’m so sorry I hurt you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I stare at these final words, my reflection fractured across the screen. And then I press “send.”
Holding back tears and a sliver of hope, I stare at that blinking green dot, praying for him to respond, desperate for him to say he’s here, that he cares, that he accepts me and wants to keep me in his life in whatever way he can.
But as the seconds tick by, as the truck’s heater turns this ice box into a sauna, I can’t ignore the fact that that green light is still blinking and there are no dots saying Arrow’s typing.
Disappointment crashes down on me.
For so long, Arrow felt like more than a friend—he felt like a lifeline. Oliver felt like more than a hope—he felt like destiny.
Him not wanting me doesn’t make him a bad person.
It makes him someone I can’t put my hopes in any longer, though. I can’t keep giving parts of myself away when it’s not making me whole. I’m afraid I’ll disappear.
I stare at the phone, at that green blinking dot, hoping. Pleading with the heavens to make him answer?—
And then my alarm beeps.
