Enough for food and a few supplies for tomorrow. I put the tin back in the small nook and press the panel back into place.
My wallet sits on the little table beside the bed where I left it. Black leather, worn at the corners, stitching coming loose along the top. I pick it up and flip it open to slide the cash in.
And there they are.
Both of them.
Folded flat behind the card slot, tucked into the crease where the leather folds against itself. Two scraps of paper that should not have the power to put a grown man on his knees.
My body goes still. Skylar’s handwritten notes.
I set the cash on the bed. My fingers are unsteady as I pull the first note out.
It is torn from whatever paper was closest at the time. Her handwriting races across it, fast and slanted, with the ink pressed harder in places, as if the pen had not worked properly.
You live like a raccoon. You’re welcome.
Something moves through my chest that I don’t have a clean word for.
That was Skylar’s love language. Insult first. Softness buried underneath. Care dressed as judgment so no one could accuse her of having a heart she wasn’t ready to admit still worked.
The second one waits behind it.
It’s smaller. A receipt, bent in half, the ink along one edge slightly smeared. I know what it says. I know every word. Every line. Every shaky admission she never would have said out loud unless the world was ending, and maybe not even then.
I unfold it anyway.
I’m not scared of you. I’m afraid of what I feel.
My thumb rests beneath the final sentence. I read it again. As if the words might change. As if the paper might grow merciful. But it doesn’t.
The next morning, I found that note in my jeans pocket. I shoved my hand in without thinking and felt the paper against my fingers. She had already left for school. I stood in the middle of the workshop and read her confession three times before my brain caught up with my chest.
That was the closest I had ever come to understanding what it meant to have something worth protecting.
Skylar had seen my rage. Had seen my fists, all the ugly parts I tried to hide behind swagger and smartass lines. She knew I could be violent and reckless. That I was one bad day away from ruining my own life because I had spent too long believing it was already ruined.
And she still said she wasn’t afraid of me.
God.
She should have been. And then I sat across from her in a prison visiting room and proved that she had trusted the wrong man.
My hand closes around the note, not enough to crush it.
The hunger that dragged me over here is gone. Packed up and left without a forwarding address, replaced by something heavier that settles into my ribs and with every intention of staying. I’ve never been good at naming feelings.
I fold the notes back along their creases. The paper knows exactly where to bend, finding the lines without any help from me. I slide them back behind the card slot, then tuck the cash in front of them and close the wallet.
For a long moment, I sit on the edge of the bed, holding it in both hands.
She likely still has the same number.
I still know it.
Every digit, in order.
All those nights in that cell, lying on a prison mattress in the dark, staring at nothing while the world slept without me, I told myself I would call her tomorrow. Just to hear her voice. To know she was still out there somewhere, still breathing, still carrying that particular fire she was born with, a fire nobody and nothing had ever managed to put out. Just once, so I could hear her say hello before I hung up and let her go again.
