Page 87 of All the Ugly Things
He dropped his hand back to the couch. “Can I ask you something you probably don’t want to talk about?”
“Depends.”
“Inside… when you were…”
“In prison. Saying the words won’t send me back you know.”
My joke fell flat and he nodded.
“I know. But, really. When you were there. What did you miss the most?”
The most? That was easy to think of. But saying it out loud? The words tripped over themselves on their way out my throat. “Josh. My brother.”
“He’s in Illinois?”
“Yes.” Buried. It wasn’t a lie, although it wasn’t honest, either. I wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral even before I was charged. The entire city came out to show their support. All of his teammates. Most of UI mourned him.
No one wanted the killer in their midst.
While Hudson inferred he knew why I was in jail, I didn’t know how much of the specifics he knew. A part of me still wanted to ask and figure out why they bothered helping me in the first place.
The other part of me was just trying to remember to be thankful for what I’d been given.
“Now that you’re out and free—”
I held one finger up in the air. “Technically, I’m on parole.”
“Okay, free-ish. What do you cherish the most?”
“Gosh.” I blew out a breath and glanced at the fire. That was a tough one. When you spend most of your day surrounded by gray and white cement and very little time outside, every day felt exactly like the last. I spent hours, trying to remember what it felt like to be among the sights and sounds of daily life. The honk of car horns, the occasional car alarm. Slamming doors and little voices as they played in the neighborhood…
“This will sound silly,” I said, already shaking my head.
“Silly isn’t bad.”
“We spent time outside, you know? We had free time to wander the grounds and some of it was actually pretty. Lots of trees and shade, benches, it wasn’t all cages and despair like televisions make some of the men’s prisons you see.”
“But—”
“But it was still sad. It always felt like even the sun was sadder when it shined over us, so I would say I just cherish being able to be outside. Car lights at night, horns. Happy people. Laughter. It still makes me nervous when I’m around a lot of people, but I used to sit outside the first shelter home I was in and justlistento all the noise.”
His hand that was propping up his head fell and landed on my shoulder where his thumb brushed back and forth.
It was the first time he’d touched me in that way and an unexpected warmth flooded my skin, popping goose bumps down to my toes.
“That doesn’t sound silly, Lilly. It sounds sad.”
It was. But I couldn’t do anything about that, so I shrugged. “There’s no point in being sad, not for me.”
“I can’t be sad you lost so many years of your life, some would say the best years?”
“I can’t change it. What’s the point?”
“You can work to make up for what you’ve lost.”
Frustration pricked down my spine. In the span of a few moments, he’d made me think about too much. The thick silence earlier was suddenly preferable to all of this talking.
“Which is why I took the job with your dad. I am trying. But when you now have my history and record, the future doesn’t always look bright.”
