Page 27 of Glass Wings

“No,” he says. “I think the hole is mine to crawl into and sit in for as long as it takes. But I can hand you a rope. Rick can decide if it’s strong enough to pull on.”

Hearing my lawyer’s name from his mouth makes my spine stiffen. “You don’t know Rick.”

“I don’t have to. I know you. You’d rather chew glass than take help from me. But if this gets you home before that baby is born, I don’t care if you never say my name again.”

He slides the paper into the slot. It rattles through and stops against my side of the metal lip. I don’t touch it.

“I don’t trust you,” I say. “Not with anything that matters.”

“I don’t trust me either,” he says simply. “Not with who I was then. I’m trying to be someone else now. I have a daughter that looks up to me.”

“People don’t get to remake themselves because they decide to be sorry.”

“True,” he says. “They get to remake themselves because they decide to act like they’re sorry.”

Silence sits down with us. Some other conversation in another booth ends in laughter that feels obscene.

I finally pick up the paper. Names are written in Gray’s blocky print.

“Why now?” I ask. “Why this? You could have mailed this. You could have given it to Rick.”

“I needed you to see my face,” he says. “So, if you ever want to look me in the eye and tell me to fuck off forever, you know what you’re turning down.”

A bitter grin slides up my cheek before I can stop it. “You still haven’t apologized for what you did, and you’re still fucking dramatic.”

“Says the guy writing poetry to a baby he hasn’t met yet in a jail cell.”

“Fuck you,” I say, but it doesn’t have teeth.

Gray’s mouth tilts. “There he is.”

I hate that he can make a joke and aim it right at the part of me that used to laugh with him. I hate that my body remembers his as the one that stood between me and those bigger boys when we were eight, and how he kept doing it until we were old enough to pretend, we didn’t need to.

“You don’t get to be my brother again,” I say.

“I know.” He holds my gaze. “But I was. And I still am in the way that matters when you’re drowning. I don’t care what you call me. I’ll show up when I hear the water.”

Anger and something like grief surges up the back of my throat. “Say the words,” I say. “If you came here to be a man, then say the words you should’ve said when I was eighteen and they locked the door behind me.”

He doesn’t blink. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For framing you. For letting you carry it alone. For not coming to see you because I couldn’t face the shit I’d done. For choosing myself over my brother. I’m sorry, Easton.”

Hearing the sound of my name like that breaks something I’ve been holding on to for too long. I look down at the paper so I won’t have to look at him and bleed.

“Why should I believe you?”

“You shouldn’t,” he says. “Believe the actions that come after. Give me a list. I’ll go get you the rest of the witnesses. I’ll sit in the back of the courtroom and keep my head down if you don’t want me seen. I’ll send money to Harley without my name on it when she needs a crib or a doctor’s bill covered. None of it fixes what I did, but it’s what I can do now.”

I don’t say anything. My hand has gone to my pocket without me telling it to, thumb rubbing the fold of Harley’s letter through the cloth.

Despite everything, despite the fear and the distance, I still believe in you. In us.

She wrote that about me.

“I’ll get this to Rick,” I say finally. “He’ll know whether it’s anything.”

Gray nods. “I figured.”

“If you’re lying to me⁠—”