Page 25 of Glass Wings

I close my laptop and press my hands against my stomach. It’s still flat, still mine, but it won’t be for long.

“Your daddy’s dreaming about you,” I whisper into the quiet. “And I’m trying, too.”

Fifteen

EASTON

The last letter from Harley is still warm from where I’ve been keeping it under my shirt, pressed to my skin like it can sink straight into me and fill the hollowed parts. I read it once at lights-out, then again when the footsteps fade, again when the guy two cells down starts snoring, and again when the fluorescent hum of electricity gets so loud it feels like it’s chewing on the inside of my skull. I smile every time I reach the end with her list of names, the way she wrote I still believe in you. In us.

I fold the paper carefully along the same creases I made an hour ago and set it on the thin pillow. Then I pick it back up because I can’t help myself. Her handwriting is wavered in a few places, the letters slanting, sharper, where she was trying not to cry. And there’re little ridges in the page where a teardrop has fallen and dried.

A key rattles somewhere down the tier. Metal kisses metal. Voices breathe low and mean. This place has always smelled like bleach and old breath, like a hospital that has given up. I sit on the edge of the bunk with Harley’s letter open and try to picture her at her desk, the one I built for her when she first moved in all those years ago. The glow of her laptop would be shining across her face while she edited newspaper articles, the special blue light glasses I bought her sitting high on the bridge of her nose.

Every time we went to a craft store she bought stationary, I always joked she’d never have use for it, but here we are, and all those pretty papers and pens she’s collected are slowly being used up.

Footsteps stop at my door. The guard, Harris, the one who’s learned to say my name without a sneer, looks at me through the bars.

“Diggs,” he says. “Visitor.”

For a second, my heart cramps so hard I have to put a hand to my sternum. “Now?”

Harris’s mouth twitches, like it wants to be sympathetic but has been trained not to. “Now.”

Harley. It has to be her. Who else would come on a weekday except the woman who signs off a letter with Always and means it every time, even when it hurts?

I fold the letter like it’s made of glass and slid it into my pocket, smoothing it flat once, twice, because my hands have started to shake. I drag my fingers through my hair out of habit, and then remember that there’s nothing to fix, nothing to hide. I could be covered in dirt and grease and it wouldn’t matter. Not to her. She would see right through to the soft places and call me hers anyway.

Chains again. Ankles first, then wrists. I stand and the cuffs lift my shoulders into the posture I remember too well, the one that makes me feel like a picture pinned in a frame. Harris clips the leash to the chain around my waist and nods toward the corridor.

We walk over concrete, scuffed and stained. A flicker in the light overhead keeps time with my pulse. I try not to think about the last time I thought I was walking toward freedom, only to be told no again. I try not to think about the way Harley had folded in the gallery when the judge said denied, like the word itself held weight that landed directly on her spine.

We turn into the visiting block and the noise changes; muffled voices layer over each other, phones ring on the walls, and there’s a distant echo of the clack of keyboard keys at the check-in desk. Harris unhooks the leash and points at an empty booth. The glass is fogged faintly from the last conversation.

She isn’t here yet. My chest does that tight-loose thing it does whenever hope gets too close to anger. I sit, palms flat and fingers tapping once on the edge of the steel table. I tell myself I won’t stand to meet her, won’t make a scene, won’t put my hand on the glass like in the movies and ask for something we aren’t allowed to have.

The door on the other side opens.

It isn’t Harley.

For half a breath I don’t register who it is. All I know is that it isn’t her. The man who steps in is taller by a mark, his shoulders wider than I remember, and a scar I don’t recognize notches his left eyebrow. He looks like someone I used to know, wearing a suit stitched from a different life.

Then his mouth twitches in that crooked way, like he can’t decide whether to grin or duck, and I wish for the floor to drop out from underneath me.

Gray Hughes. My long-lost foster brother.

My hands go cold. The phone on my side of the glass might as well be a snake. He picks his up first and holds it near his jaw, not pressing his lips to it. Waiting.

I don’t move. Blood roars in my ears. For a second all I can see are a dozen snapshots at once. Two boys climbing a chain-link fence behind a foster house that reeked of burnt toast and cigarettes. Gray laughing on a bike that didn’t belong to us. Gray’s hand landing on my shoulder the day we packed a trash bag with everything we owned. Gray not meeting my eyes the day the cops ambushed us in that bar. A thousand days passing with silence where a brother used to be.

He presses the phone to his ear. “Hey, East.”

The nickname hits like a fist to the nose. I pick up my phone and hold it like it might bite.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.

“I know.” He glances at the camera in the corner. “Didn’t think they’d let me in to tell you in person.”

“What?” The word comes out dry. “That you’re sorry? That you didn’t mean it? You practiced that on the way over?”