Then morning would come, and common sense would crawl back in. She was building some version of a life, and calling her would be selfish on my part. So I stayed gone.
Some men find religion in prison. They find God, purpose, or the particular peace that comes from accepting something larger than themselves. I got haunted by a contact I never dialed.
My phone sits on the kitchen counter. I can feel it from here, full of temptation and stupid ideas. I sit with it anyway.
What would I even say to her?
Hey, Sky. I’m out. Been out for two days. Still have your notes. Both of them. I still think about your scar, your mouth, and the way you laughed when you didn’t mean to. I still think about you every single day.
Start with sorry, you sick bastard.
One word. Just that. The smallest possible beginning. But sorry doesn’t even cover it. Sorry is a word you hand someone when you’ve bumped into their shoulder in a corridor. Not what I did to her.
I stand up.
The wallet goes into my back pocket, heavy as a loaded gun. Then I move over and grab my old leather jacket from the back of the chair, shove my arms through even though it is a littletighter now than before, and head for the stairs. The steel rings hollow under my boots on the way down.
I unlock the side door.
The cold night air hits me square in the face, sharp enough to wake the parts of me I wish would stay dead. For a second, I stand staring out at a world that continued moving without me.
Somewhere out there, Skylar is living the life I told myself I wanted for her. Without my name dragging behind her like a chain. Without my damage bleeding into everything she tried to become.
I step outside and pull the door shut behind me.
I close my eyes and tell myself the same thing I’ve told myself for years. She is better off without me. And maybe one day, if I say it enough, it will stop fucking hurting so much.
Chapter 6
Skylar
This building always smells like someone else’s dinner. Garlic. Cumin. The faint ghost of whatever Mrs. Petrakis on the third floor has been simmering since noon. I have lived with that smell for two years and still haven’t decided whether I love it or hate it.
Some nights, it feels like coming home. Other nights, it reminds me that everyone else in this building has someone to cook for.
Tonight, it just makes my stomach twist.
My feet ache.
They always ache by Friday, and today has been what Fridays usually are. Long and soaked through with other people’s pain. Three intake meetings. One emergency housing call. A court appearance for one of my kids, a seventeen-year-old namedMarcus who aged out early and is now in a county shelter because his placement dissolved a week before his birthday. Dissolved. That is the word they use. A placement dissolves.
Fuck me, it’s child abandonment. Funny how language always knows how to make cruelty sound less expensive.
I sat two rows behind him in court, watching the back of his neck, the way he kept his spine straight and his jaw locked. All that teenage pride holding together a body already asked to carry too much too young. I knew that posture in my bones, the way you know a song you never chose to memorize but learned anyway, note by note, whether you wanted to or not. Dignity as armor. Pride as currency. Silence as the only thing left that no one can take from you without permission.
I fought for him.
I always fight for them. That’s my job. It’s the one part of my life I have never let anyone touch.
I am a Youth Advocate at New Ground, a nonprofit built for foster youth who have aged out or are about to be shoved into adulthood with a garbage bag of belongings and no one legally obligated to give a shit anymore.
A woman named Patricia handed me a flyer outside the community college I was attending and said, simply, that we could use someone who has been through it, so if you are aware of anyone, please let us know.
She had no fucking idea.
When I told her my story, about the homes, the rotating cast of adults with dead eyes and government funding, about Cassie and what we survived together, about Zane and the wreckage of that, and about how grief can hollow a person out so thoroughly you stop recognizing yourself in the mirror for a while, something shifted on Patricia’s face. It wasn’t pity; it was recognition. That conversation lasted two hours, and by the endof it I understood, for the first time, that everything I had been through was not a liability. It was the qualification.
Patricia hired me before I graduated from community college and I have worked my way up from intake coordinator to case manager to senior youth advocate in five years. No family name opening doors. No one calling in a favor on my behalf. Just my voice, my history, and the feral, furious little piece of me that refuses to watch another kid feel invisible in a room full of people.
