We have an understanding in Hell. A kind of camaraderie. A lot of people, when they first arrive, cry the same kind of cry: I don’t belong here! They do it until they realize no one is listening—no one with any kind of overruling power at least. And the people who are listening are not the kind of people you want to show weakness to. Eventually, everyone stops, and the people who said it most become the people who teach the newcomers the danger in the words, and so on.

And if you survive past that—which you have to, because death is a ticket already punched—eventually, you start taking just the teensiest bit of pride in your locale. Yeah, you think. I’m a bad motherfucker. These are my people. We, the damned.

But I have a confession to make. Even when I spoke from that place, that camaraderie, I never really meant it. There’s always been a part of me—an embryo of a thing, some tiny little molecule, translucent and barely beating—that still believes I was not a bad person. That I came here for a good reason. A valiant one.

Now I had the answer in my hand, wet but still intact, and I found that little part of me screaming. What if I was wrong, and Cal was right? What if Hell was always the end of my story? What if I belonged here?

I ran my thumb along the edge of the fold, tiny pills of wet paper trailing behind.

“You don’t want to know, do you?” Cal asked.

I shook my head. “No, I do,” I started. “It’s just . . .”

“What if it’s not what you thought?”

“Right.”

“Well,” Cal said, then spat on a streak of her father’s blood on her shoe and used the hem of her sleeve to scrub it clean. “Do you want me to tell you?”

“Is it bad?”

“That’s a subjective question.”

I put the paper on my desk, and it was like my fingers held opposing magnets. I simply couldn’t unfold it.

“Tell me,” I said, finally.

Cal nodded. I felt her step up behind me. “You had a daughter— do you remember that?”

She asked it quietly, a different kind of quiet than I had ever heard from her. Like she was talking in a library or a church. Like she was acquainted with respect.

I shook my head.

“She was sick,” she said. “Cancer. She was only seven or eight when she was diagnosed, but it was the kind that moves really fast. I don’t remember exactly what. You made a deal. You took the cancer instead.”

She put her hand on my arm, just the fingertips.

“You were a good man, Pey.”

I nodded, inhaling sharply enough to break free from her touch, even though I wanted it.