Clearly, that had been a miscalculation, even though I’d worked hard, showed up every day on time, and kept my head down. Apparently, I wasn’t even worthy of scraping dried food off other people’s dirty plates.

“What are you gonna do now?” my uncle asked.

I looked away, tapping my knuckle on the table. What are you gonna do now? That was the question. The one I’d been trying to answer for the last four months since I’d been released from prison. Only, what I did now didn’t seem to be up to me. Once…once I’d had a legacy. Now I had a criminal record and extremely limited employment options, if any existed at all.

But I pushed thoughts of legacy far, far away. That had been taken from me a long time ago and it wasn’t something worth dwelling on. “I don’t know,” I murmured. But I had to do something. The terms of my probation required me to have a job, not to mention I’d racked up some serious debt before I’d been sent to prison. And adding to that, I had a responsibility to help two people who’d suffered the fallout of my failure.

Hopelessness flooded me and for a moment I felt crushed under its unseen weight. My uncle had taken me in when I was seventeen, put up with a whole slew of bad behavior over the years, and then taken me in again when I was released, but he had issues of his own and lived paycheck to paycheck as it was. He couldn’t afford to help me financially, and though I appreciated the roof over my head, the thought of living on my uncle’s couch for even one more month, made that weight grow heavier.

Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s leagues better than the lumpy cot you slept on for six years in a windowless cell. That was true, but it did little to bolster my mood. Because in prison, I’d had an end date to move toward. Here, in the outside world, it was becoming increasingly clear that I was still stuck, even if in different ways, just as I’d been behind bars.