I make myself move. One foot in front of the other.
The parking lot stretches ahead, heat already shimmering off the asphalt even this early in the day. A handful of cars sit scattered across it. A woman cries into someone’s chest, her shoulders shaking. A kid sits on a curb, staring at his shoes.
I keep walking until I see it.
Rainer’s truck. Parked near the edge of the lot, like it’s been sitting there for seven years, just waiting for this day.
My chest does something I’m unprepared for.
The driver’s door swings open.
Rainer climbs out more slowly than he used to, but he still carries himself the same way. Back straight. Shoulders square. His hair has more gray now, threading through the dark in streaks that weren’t there before. His face has deeper lines, carved around his mouth and eyes.
He shouldn’t be here.
That’s the first thought that comes to me. I told him that every day he showed up in that visitation room. That I wasn’t his responsibility and that he had his own life to live somewhere else, not in a plastic chair behind reinforced glass.
For the first two years, he kept coming anyway.
And then I said things meant to wound, because I have always been good at that. I find the exact place a person is soft and press hard until they pull back. It’s a horrible skill I learnt over the years, sharpening it in every foster home that taught me people leave, so you may as well be the one to push them out the door first.
It worked. He stopped coming.
I told myself that was what I wanted, but in reality, I wanted to see him.
He looks at me across the parking lot, and for one brutal second, I’m eighteen again.
Standing in his workshop, blood on my hands, sirens screaming closer, louder, tearing through the night air from somewhere down the road.
I blink.
The sirens fade, and the parking lot comes back.
Rainer just stands there beside that rusted old beast of a truck and looks at me the same way he always did, like I was more than the life I have been handed, and he has never once questioned it.
I swallow hard and step forward.
He watches me as I approach. His eyes sweep across my face the way you look at something you’ve worried about for a long time, checking for damage, cataloging what seven years does to a person.
I let him look. I’ve got nothing left to hide.
“Zane,” he says.
That’s it. One word. My name on his lips, then he turns and climbs back in.
I move to the passenger door and stare at the handle, because getting in means it’s real. That dream I always envisioned, the gates are actually behind me. It means the next chapter has started. The part I have no fucking map for.
“You getting in?” Rainer asks from the other side.
I pull the door open and climb in.
Rainer’s hand pauses on the gearshift. He clears his throat and looks through the windshield. He pulls out of the parking lot.
I stare ahead, watching the road unroll through the glass, and the world rushes past in colors that are almost too much.
The world doesn’t pause because yours ended. It doesn’t hold still while you’re in there counting days until you get out. It keeps moving. Seasons turn, girls grow into women, and people rearrange their lives around the space you left because that’s what people do when they aren’t locked in a cage with time sitting on their chest.
The question is already forming before I can shut it down. It’s clawing its way up the inside of my chest, dragging itself through the rot and regret, clinging to every rib on the way. It sits at the base of my throat, raw, desperate, and pathetic in the way only the truest things ever are.
