Yes. Every last memory and everything she’d ever taught him, he would share with his son. How could he not? Any ounce of tenderness he possessed was owed to her, which his son—her grandson—deserved by the barrel. It didn’t feel like a true promise if he couldn’t verbalize it, but how could he with all this gravel shredding him from the inside out? All he could do was squint up at her and try to transmit this oath via their gazes, but she kept asking the same question, again and again, and then he woke up.

Every morning in this cell was half nightmare, half miracle. Either way, it was surreal and hard to believe that after such a night, the sun had returned and motion resumed. He’d gotten into the habit of verifying this seemingly improbable cycle. First thing every morning, he would crane off his bunk to peer out the envelope-sized slot in the concrete, double-checking if daylight was still shining and life beyond still happening, possibly even waiting for him.

A second envelope-sized slot in the cell was cut into the center of the steel door. The tip of a baton entered it and clanked against its rims, the preamble to individual messages.

“Visitor,” a voice said. “Hands.”

Henry pressed his back to the door and slipped his wrists through the slot to be cuffed, before being led to the visitation hall.

In the yard and corridors and mess hall, all the inmates’ papery navy jumpsuits were propped by chests ballooning with don’t-fuck-with-me pomp. But here, in the visitation hall, spines jellied and curled into question marks. Shoulders huddled into phone receivers as if they were prayer beads. A despondent gravity tugged a row of forgotten men into panes of bulletproof glass reinforced by a thin wire chain-link that crosshatched visitors’ likenesses into chunky pixels.

Once locked inside a booth, Henry was uncuffed. On the other side of the glass, Michelle was an ice pick. Gaunt from exhaustion, crusty with poverty. A wet stain over her left nipple made a black thought bubble above their baby’s head. Junior was sound asleep, a beautiful nugget wrapped in a mangy bath towel. That snarl of suspicion still hadn’t left Michelle’s glare. It had hardened over her gaze ever since he’d climbed into the witness stand.

Henry took the receiver in one hand, flattened the other against the pane as an invitation to Michelle’s. Hers were occupied, though. One was holding their son, the other at her mouth as she gnawed on a cuticle. She cauterized the raw fingertip with a lick before readjusting her grip around Junior and clutching the phone against her shoulder.

Though his mouth was still a desert, this time Hey fell out instead of sand.

“Hey,” she said, just as arid. “Holding up in there?”

His hand, unmet, descended, streaking four smudges down the pane.