Chapter 1

“Now Bailey, this is the last time,” I said as I pressed play on the DVD remote to start Tangled over again for at least the third time.

“But what if I wake up again?” my daughter whined from her bed.

“If you wake up again, please, for the love of daddy's sanity, pick another movie.”

I walked over to the nightstand next to the bed and turned on the tiny lamp and made sure the humidifier was running. Bailey had been sick since early afternoon, and I was just as miserable as she was. It was fifteen minutes until the clock hit three in the morning, and I hadn't even had the opportunity to close my eyes between vomiting spells, doses of medicine, and restarting movies.

“I want to grow my hair out like Rapunzel, daddy, and have the longest hair in all the world.”

“Your hair grows like your mom's – slowly. You'll be thirty by the time that happens, then you'll simply be too old to use your hair to help boys sneak into your bedroom.”

“But I want to,” she whined again.

If my girlfriend didn't get home from “shopping” with her friends soon, I thought I might commit myself.

“Bailey, let's get through a whole night of throwing up before we start a new adventure, okay? Daddy needs some sleep.”

I turned the room light out and walked over to make a small place for myself on her bed. I was way too tall to fit comfortably in a toddler bed, but I knew she would never close her eyes unless I laid with her, so I made the best of it and squeezed myself in.

The minute I did it I knew it was a bad idea, and I'd probably find myself waking up here in the morning in pain – it was a too tight of a fit, but her bed was almost as soft as my own was.

“Okay Bailey-bear,” I said with a groan as I finally found a nearly-fitting position and laid my head on the pink pillow next to hers. “You're comfy, daddy's comfy, let's go back to sleep.”

She was silent for a few minutes, and I started to think this time was going to be easy.

“Daddy?”

No such luck.

“Yeah?”

“Mommy's gone a lot.”

I was too tired to think of a good comeback appropriate enough for a four-year-old, and too upset with her mother to even care.

“Yeah, baby, she is.”

“Is she like Cinderella?”

Bailey loved every kind of princess, and everything in her world was like a fairy tale movie, but this association seriously threw even me.

“What do you mean, Bailey?”

“Cinderella rode off to a ball in a pumpkin and a pretty dress and she was gone until really late and she lost her shoe but she met Prince Charming. Is mommy like Cinderella because she's always gone until really late?”

Bailey never failed to amuse me with her Disney-warped sense of reality. Luckily it was pretty dark and she couldn't see my wry smile.

“Well, maybe she is. She has lots of pretty dresses, but she rides off to all her balls in daddy's Mercedes, not a pumpkin.”

“Does she have glass slippers?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, mommy does have a lot of shoes – but no glass slippers.”

“Maybe you should buy her some glass slippers, daddy.”

This time, I couldn't help but laugh. “I'll keep that in mind, Bailey-bear.”

“Are you mommy's Prince Charming, daddy?”

I smiled, because it was flattering that the thought had even crossed my daughter's mind.

“I don't know, baby. Do you think I'm like Prince Charming?”

“I think you're mommy's Prince Charming. I hope maybe one day I meet a Prince Charming.”

“Okay,” I said, “new rule. No more Disney movies for you. Close your eyes before you give daddy anxiety issues.”

The room was quiet except for the movie for a little bit longer, but with Bailey, silence never lasted very long.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?” I asked with a smile.

“You didn't say 'I love you'.”

I turned to look at her. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dark, and I could see her wide but exhausted eyes staring at me.

“Daddy's just so tired, he forgot. I love you, Bailey.”

“It's okay, daddy,” she said in a motherly tone. “I love you, too. Now close your eyes and go to sleep.”

She put one hand on my cheek and closed her eyes. I watched her eyelashes flutter for a few minutes and kissed her forehead, then closed my own eyes to rest them once she looked like she was starting to doze off.

Before I knew it I had dozed off myself. I opened my eyes back up once I realized what I had done and looked at the lit-up display of the clock next to the bed – 3:17AM.

“Damn,” I quietly moaned to myself. I rubbed the deep wrinkles on my forehead from lack of sleep and started to decide exactly how I would slip out of this bed without waking my little girl up again.

After about five minutes of craning into weird positions, I managed to get out quietly enough that she only stirred once. I checked the humidifier one more time before shutting off the lamp and sneaking out of the door, leaving it open a crack so I could hear if Bailey called for me again.

I realized as I walked down our staircase that one battle was over for now, but my night was not over yet. The silence in the house was deafening, which meant my girlfriend still wasn't home.

Brayden and I had met two years after the band went on our permanent hiatus. She was a model back then, but a young and naïve woman at 22. She had been working with a scam modeling agency, doing a few decent odd jobs here and there. I had met her at a small fashion show after-party in Europe, where she had told me all about her problems getting paid from her agency.

We got close, I spent the next year getting her back on her feet – helping her get a new agency, new head shots, and getting her back into modeling regularly – and we had been inseparable since then.

A few months after she had finally started becoming successful in her career, Bray had unexpectedly ended up pregnant. Bailey came into our lives a few months later and even though she was unplanned, we quickly realized that our lives would never have been the same without her.

These days, Brayden wasn't doing a lot of modeling. She had gained weight in her pregnancy and, of course, became less of an asset to big companies. Her new modeling agency had worked to glamourize her after-baby figure, which I personally found even more gorgeous than the before figure, but it was something that a good percentage of the fashion industry wasn't looking for.

For the first few months, it seemed Bray had embraced motherhood rather than focusing on the loss of her career. She spent her days cleaning, baking, and crafting with Bailey. If I couldn't find the two of them in the kitchen, I could always find them at the dining room table covered in glitter, glue and construction paper.

Then Brayden had met some new friends, and everything seemed to change overnight. Slowly, the glitter and baking utensils were replaced with late nights out and lying about where she was going. It had gotten worse over the past year, and I was growing tired of feeling like a single parent.

The first place my feet took me when I got downstairs was to the refrigerator to grab a beer. It seemed the more Bray did this, the more I found myself drinking, too. The more my own problems built up, the more I wondered where the three of us were headed – which made me drink even more. It was a stupid thing for me to do, but at night when Bailey was asleep and I was alone waiting for Bray to get home, I couldn't help myself.

I walked into the living room and stepped over the piles of toys carefully, and turned on the floor lamp beside the couch before sitting down and grabbing the remote. I was feeling completely defeated tonight, and I mindlessly scrolled through hundreds of channels before settling on late-night reruns of I Love Lucy.

I watched halfheartedly, focusing more on staying awake and constantly checking the driveway and the garage to see if Bray had pulled up. Four o'clock quickly came, and I was about to call the police when I saw bright headlights pull into the driveway. Bray was finally home from her longest all-nighter in several months, and I couldn't wait to hear the ridiculous explanation that she would give me this time.

I took a deep breath to calm myself as I heard her key in the doorway turn. When she stumbled inside a few seconds later, she looked at me briefly, apparently startled that I was still awake. Then she pursed her lips and a nasty little smile formed on her face.

She didn't say a word as she locked the door back up and threw her coat up on the hook on the wall, right next to Bailey's pink jacket, still smiling the whole time. She turned and walked through the living room in her heels, strutting with her single shopping bag waving at her side. She smiled the whole way to the kitchen and threw her bag and keys on top of the kitchen island, landing with a clang on the ceramic tile.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” I said without looking at her. “Nice of you to finally turn up, Bray. I started to think that Victoria's Secret swallowed you up.”

“Big sale,” she remarked, holding strong to her bitchy attitude.

“That must have been one hell of a sale for it to last until four in the morning.”

“We went out for drinks afterward,” she spit at me.

“Well, I hope you had fun. I'll make sure to explain that to your daughter when she asks for the fifth time tonight why mom wasn't home to tell her goodnight. Wish I knew what to tell her about the past six months worth of missed goodnights, though.”

“Why don't you tell her the same thing you've been telling all your friends – that I'm just a huge bitch.”

All I could do was stare at her – this was not the same Brayden that I knew and had fallen completely in love with. She had turned into a monster.

“You want me to go and wake the kid up and tell her goodnight? I will, if you'd like.”

“She's got the flu and she's finally asleep without a fever, so no, I don't want you to. And if you can't wipe that little smile off your face and drop your attitude, you should go stay with one of your drunken friends for the night.”

She smiled wider instead, and chuckled.

“Those who live in glass houses, Lance. Bailey's so lucky to have a dad who's always halfway past drunk. You've been drinking again tonight, too. I can still smell it on you.”

“I've been home. Which is a far reach from you – you've been out of this house at least fourteen hours, probably drinking for the past seven or eight. Who knows what you've been doing the rest of that time; you haven't been here taking care of anything.”

“I'm sorry I'm not perfect like you are,” she said sarcastically.

“Brayden, I'm not asking you to be perfect. I'm asking you to be here. I'm sick of being a single parent, getting no sleep because Bailey is up a million times a night missing her mother, or I'm waiting up for you to make sure you get home safe, or even at all. I'm tired of the drama. It was okay when we were teenagers, but we're parents now. It's time you – we – start acting like it.”

“Drama!” she scoffed. “Drama. You want to know what I think of your drama, Lance?”

She threw the fridge open and grabbed the last two bottles of beer, and pulled a bottle opener out of the drawer hastily, throwing the drawer closed. She proceeded to pull the tops off both beer bottles and pour the contents down the drain, looking at me with satisfaction.

“That's really mature, Bray.”

“You want mature? I'll give you mature.”

All of a sudden the look in her eyes became wild – almost possessed. She reached down and pulled her top over her head, and tossed it over to the kitchen table.

“Bray, what are you doing?”

“You wanted mature. Is this mature enough for you, baby?”

She leaned down and took off her high heels one by one, using the counter for leverage. She was obviously drunk; I could smell the liquor combining with her perfume.

“I can take it all off for you, Lance.”

“Bray, knock it off. Quit acting like this.”

“Like what, honey?” She walked away from the counter, pulling the zipper down on her skirt. “You used to love it when I acted like this. You thought it was sexy. You don't think I'm sexy anymore?”

She walked right up to me and her face was inches away from mine. With her so close now, the smell of alcohol overpowered her perfume. She used her finger to rub up and down my inner thigh, all the way up to my groin.

“I used to be enough for you. Am I still enough for you?”

As she was about to grab my crotch to take off my pants, I grabbed her hand and pulled it away.

“Stop.”

She looked in my eyes, surprised that I would refuse her so forcefully. I stared back for a few seconds before letting go of her hand and walking off.

I was about halfway to the stairs when I felt her grab my hand and spin me around, and the next thing I knew I landed back-first hard against the wall.

“Just let me give you what you want.” Her lips were inches away from mine as she talked, deciding whether she would move in for more. “I know you want it.”

She finally leaned in and put her lips against mine. When she kissed me, it didn't feel like I was kissing the same woman that I had a few years ago. This new wild woman wasn't someone that I felt any kind of emotions for.

“I'm done,” I yelled as I broke the kiss and pushed her away from me. “It's over, Bray. I'm leaving.”

As I made my way up the stairs, I heard her following closely behind me.

“I've wasted six years of my life on your sorry ass!” she yelled towards me. “Six years with a loser from a fucking boy band.”

I went immediately to the closet and pulled my suitcase out of the closet. It got stuck on several boxes and I finally had to give one hard pull, spilling out other things in the process. All I wanted was to get out of here as fast as I could.

“You're a D-lister on the brink of falling off the food chain all together. One more little push, and you'll be done – off the radar.”

As I pulled any random clothes off their hangers and threw them in the suitcase, she pulled shirts and pants out of my hands and threw them on the floor.

“The only thing that's off the radar is you,” I said. “I don't know what the hell is wrong with you tonight, but you're just fucking crazy.”

“What's wrong with me is you,” she said. “You're such a loser. I don't know why I ever bothered with you.”

As I was throwing clothes in, she opened the door to the patio and walked outside, still in only her bra and underwear. As I walked over to see what she was going to do now, I saw her saunter over to the railing.

“Hey New York,” she yelled into the air. “Lance Bass is nothing but a washed up boy band loser. He can't even get it up anymore! He must have hung around his boy toys too long and turned gay – he doesn't find me sexy anymore!”

I gritted my teeth and grabbed one of my shirts that Bray had tossed around off the bed, and walked outside. I wrapped the shirt around as much of her top as I could and grabbed her by both shoulders and pushed her back inside.

“Have you gone completely out of your fucking mind?” I screamed. “It's not enough to pull me into your insanity, you have to wake up the whole neighborhood and pull them in, too?”

“Just shut up and get out,” she said with a smile. “I don't want to be with you. Get your shit and get out, you fucking loser.”

“Gladly,” I said as I zipped up the suitcase and pulled it off the bed.

As I walked down the stairs and grabbed the keys to the Mercedes off the kitchen counter, she followed me the whole way, laughing and spouting off more nonsense. I'd stopped listening; I was only interested in getting out of here to find a hotel so I could pick Bailey up in the morning. I was finally going to change our situation entirely. We were starting over – without psycho Cinderella.

Chapter 2

There was something about cruising down the Brooklyn Bridge in the Mercedes as the sun came up that helped me calm my nerves and process my thoughts. After Bray's outburst, I was confused about how I was feeling, and needed to make sense of it. So instead of finding a hotel like I had planned to do, I drove.

I was cruising with Nelly playing on her iPod that she had left hooked up to the stereo, and this song was on repeat for the third time because it felt right for this moment. Even though I hadn't slept all night, my exhaustion had disappeared and was replaced with confusion and a weird sense of pain that I'd never experienced before.

I had been contemplating leaving Bray for a while, because of all the lies and the nagging doubts. Our relationship had been threatening to fall apart for a long time and I'd prepared myself for the day that this happened. I had expected to feel free and ready to start over, but right now I didn't. I'd been driving for hours and I still hadn't answered my main question – how did it come to this?

The two of us used to have a good relationship, and I'd even considered marriage once or twice. After a while, it seemed like something that wasn't necessary for us. Bailey had come along and I'd considered it more seriously, but in just a few months Bray had lost all the trust that I could give her. I couldn't marry someone that I couldn't trust.

If I had married Bray, it would have made walking out on her tonight more difficult, as if it wasn't already with a child involved. Right now, my main concern wasn't the legal issues we would have because of the breakup – it was the fact that I'd left my daughter at home alone with a drunk, raging lunatic.

Now that I had calmed down and had time to think, I knew that going back to the house to get her myself was a bad idea, and Bray would probably go berserk again. I definitely couldn't go back – but I knew someone who could.

“You know it's seven in the morning, right?” Joey answered the phone half-asleep and slurring his words.

“I'm sorry, man. You know I wouldn't call this early if it wasn't important.” I paused, feeling a little guilty. “Up all night again?”

“Half the night, at least. I thought kids were supposed to sleep more as they got older, not less.”

I chuckled. When Bailey was a baby, we got so little sleep that we thought we would eventually go delirious. I knew what Joey was going through.

“Okay, what's up? And this better be good, or I'm going to make you babysit tonight.”

“I need you to do me a favor and pick Bailey up from the house. Bray's finally lost it.”

I heard stirring and groaning on the other end. “What do you mean she's finally lost it?”

“I mean she's no longer playing with a full deck of cards. Bailey was sick all day yesterday with the flu. Bray left sometime after lunch and said she was going shopping with her friends. And you know that was a lie.”

“Of course,” he said. “She's been lying to you about this for how long now?”

“Well, Bailey was up again around two and Bray still wasn't home. I finally got Bailey back to bed around three, and Bray comes in at four in the morning totally drunk. We started arguing and she went out of her mind, man. She started pouring bottles of beer down the sink and stripping her clothes off in the middle of the kitchen.”

“Wait, she started stripping her clothes off? In the middle of a fight?”

“Yeah. I'd had it, Joe. I started packing my bag, and she walks out on the balcony half-naked and starts screaming all these things about me at the top of her lungs.”

“That's pretty damn out of it, even for Bray.”

“Yeah,” I responded. “I packed up and left. I didn't know what she would do if I packed up Bailey. I'm done, Joey. I have nothing left for that relationship. I haven't even slept yet. Who knows what Bray will do if I go back to that house to get Bailey.”

“You can't go back there. She's likely to pull some six o'clock news type of shit on you. I'm already getting dressed. You didn't even have to ask me – you know I think of Bailey like one of my own girls.”

“Thanks Joey,” I said somberly. “I don't know what we're going to do. I haven't even found a hotel for us yet.”

“Hotel, schmotel,” he said. “You're both going to come stay with us, at least until Bray calms down and gets her act together. We'll load the girls up on junk food and sugar – you know, like we used to do to Justin, before he went all Mr. Sexyback on us.”

I laughed, because Joey was only trying to make me feel better, but somehow it worked.

I was about to respond to him, but as I passed another busy intersection I saw a cop car pass out of the corner of my eye and realized I was not using my speakerphone or headset to talk.

“Joey, I gotta go, before I get pulled over or something. I'm pretty sure that's the last thing I need today.”

“I'm pretty sure you're right. Call me later.”

For a few minutes after I hung up and threw the phone down on my passenger seat, I finally felt that freedom I had been searching for. It didn't last long because I realized again that she was gone.

I didn't want to miss her and I shouldn't have, but it wasn't that easy. As tumultuous as things had been, it was hard not to think of everything good, too. Even though a greater part of the relationship was spent worrying, waiting up late, and fighting, all that occupied my head right now was the tears we both cried when our daughter was born, the nights snuggling on the couch watching movies, and the holidays spent with our families.

I didn't want this to be my life right now, or at all – I didn't want to spend so much time getting over this that I forgot to live my life, because whether it felt like it right now or not, I had a life beyond this. I was sure that being with Joey for a few days would help. Joey had been in a few relationships that weren't so great before meeting Kelly, and I would be reminded that things had turned out pretty well for him.

One way or another, things would be okay. I would get through this. Coffee and breakfast – that was all I needed right now. I could tackle anything, including this, if I had those two things.

I drove around another twenty or thirty minutes before I found a decent enough place to get something to eat. As I was about to flip the turn signal on, the phone started ringing from the seat, and out of habit I grabbed it and missed my turn.

When I looked at the screen, I saw Bray's name and picture staring back at me. She could have been calling to beg me to come back, because she had done that sort of thing when we'd had fights before. Maybe she was calling because she was furious that I'd had Joey pick up Bailey. A few hours had passed so chances were good that she had calmed down – but I wasn't sure I wanted to take the chance that she hadn't.

Regardless of the reason she was calling, I was going to hold my ground. Dragging it on surely wouldn't help my resolve to move on. So I hit the end button on my phone to disconnect her, for good.

Feeling fairly proud of myself for my accomplishment, I threw my phone down on my seat again and looked up as the light turned red and I drove through the intersection.

“Shit,” I mumbled. I looked around and adjusted myself in my seat, thankful that all the cars crossing the other way were still completely halted. I looked behind me just in time to see the cop car move into my lane and turn the red and blue lights on.

“Son of a bitch.” It was almost like I had predicted it would happen. I had opened my mouth to Joey about cops and getting pulled over, and now it was happening.

I looked for a place to pull over to the side of the road and when I finally found one, I put the car in park and turned the volume on the stereo all the way down.

“At least it's only a ticket,” I mumbled.

By the time the two cops opened their doors and got out of the car, I already had all the stuff they would ask for out and ready. If only I hadn't missed my turn into the restaurant; my stomach was growling now, and I wanted to get this over with so I could grab food.

I peeked in my rear-view mirror. There were two cops, one of them older and one who didn't even look to be my age. The older cop was on the husky side, and the old standby image of too many donuts and coffee came to mind. He walked with a saunter up to the window of my car, and he looked like he meant business. I knew there was no way I'd get out of this one with a warning.

“Morning, son,” the older cop said as he came up to my window. “Can I see your registration, driver's license and insurance, please?”

I smiled at him as I handed him all the papers I was holding.

“Do you know why we stopped you?” He looked at my driver's license and gave me a skeptical glance.

“No, sir, I'm sorry but I don't.”

“Well, son, you ran that red light back there. James Lance Bass, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey!” The younger cop spoke up excitedly from the passenger side of my car. “I knew you looked familiar. You're that guy from that boy band, isn't that it?”

“Yeah,” I said with a smile.

“Man, my big sisters used to love your music. They played some of those songs to death, I think I still know the words. How has life been treating you?”

It would have been so easy to unload the past 24 hours onto him, but this guy wasn't interested in my personal problems. He seemed more interested in me as a public figure, so I let it go.

“Well if it weren't for this, it might be pretty good,” I told him.

“Calm down there, Colton,” the older cop said with a scowl. “Let me go run this quickly, you sit tight here with Officer Colton, son.”

Officer Colton watched him walk away, and rushed from the passenger side of my car over to my driver's side window.

“So Mr. Bass, what have you been up to? Put out any new music lately?”

Oh yeah, I thought to myself with amusement. This guy is definitely a rookie cop.

“Not lately,” I said. “I kind of got out of the music business after the band, you know?

“Oh yeah, I know that.” He leaned his elbow up against my car, making himself comfortable. “It's a shame though. My sisters sure did love you.” He shook his head. “Anyway, it's kind of embarrassing but I have to admit that I listened to a little bit of your music, too. I didn't know the dance moves or anything like the girls, though.”

“Thanks,” I said with a chuckle. “It's always good to meet a fan.” Gag. We had always said that, even if we didn't mean it. “Especially a male fan.”

“Sorry about Officer Striker. He's a bit of a...” He looked towards the other cop, still seated in the car, and leaned down a little closer to me. “...hard-ass,” he whispered.

“Does he always call people 'son'?” I asked.

“Yeah. He calls me that, too. Drives me crazy. He's a good cop, though, very good at what he does. I've learned a lot from him.”

“I don't mean to be rude, but how old are you exactly?”

“I'm 25,” he said sheepishly. “I know, I'm young. I just graduated from the academy last year.”

“Well, good for you.”

I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw the officer get out of his car and start to walk towards us. I was relatively thankful because the small talk with the younger cop was getting on my nerves, but I felt like a sixteen-year-old getting his first ticket.

“Do you have a child, Mr. Bass?” Striker asked as he approached the window and handed me my papers back.

“Yes, sir, I have a daughter.”

“I saw the car seat in the back. Where is your daughter right now, son?”

“With my girlfriend,” I said. My crazy ass girlfriend, I thought.

“I smell alcohol in the car. Have you been drinking this morning, Mr. Bass?”

Shit. “I had a couple, but it's been hours,” I admitted.

“I'd like to ask you to step out of the vehicle so I can do a search,” he said. “Just to make sure that you're not carrying any open containers or weapons on you.”

I looked up at Officer Colton, who must have sensed that I was freaking out about the words search and weapons.

“It's only procedure,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I'm sure you understand.”

“Not really,” I said honestly. “You're welcome to of course, but I don't understand why. I'm not drunk. This is my girlfriend's car and she had it last night. I'm sure she went out drinking, and maybe her or one of her friends spilled something in the car.”

“Then I'm sure you have nothing to worry about, son,” Striker said. He sounded almost consoling but I wasn't fooled by it. There was no part of this guy that wanted to comfort me; he didn't like me the moment he saw my name on my driver's license. I had put two and two together while he was in the car, and I knew he recognized me as a celebrity.

I sighed and turned off the car, leaving my keys in the ignition, and slowly stepped out of the car.

“Officer Colton will escort you behind the vehicle while I conduct the search.”

The young cop put his hand near his gun the minute my left foot was on the pavement and never left as I followed him over to the sidewalk beside my car. He may have been a rookie and a chatterbox, but he was well-trained in precautions. He kept both eyes on me the entire time I walked and I could feel him sizing me up.

“Like I said, it's only procedure,” he said to me once we stopped on the pavement. “I'm sure you have nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah. Right.” Somehow that didn't justify it for me. I was in an awkward position, hoping that there were no photographers around. I didn't want to end up on the news tonight.

Officer Colton didn't say a word to me for the couple of minutes that it took Striker to search my car. We both stood there, me watching the search go on, and Colton switching between watching me and his older partner.

Finally Striker lifted his head out of my car, shut the door and started walking over to us with something in his hand.

“Colton, will you please go get the test kit?”

Officer Colton paused, and the expression on his face changed when he looked at the paper bag in Striker's hand.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Bass, can you explain this to me?” Striker said once Colton had walked away, holding up the bag to me.

“No, sir, I'm sorry I can't,” I said, shaking my head.

Striker looked away from me and sat the bag down on the trunk of my car, and gently unrolled the top of the bag. He reached in and pulled out another bag, a plastic one that wasn't completely clear. I was standing about a foot away but I could clearly see something inside of it, I just couldn't see what it was.

As Striker was pulling the contents out of the bag, Colton returned and sat a black bag down next to the paper one, blocking me from seeing what he was pulling out. Colton then approached me and kept his eyes on me, now with a more serious look on his face.

I stood stone-faced as Striker pulled stuff out of each bag. I had no idea what was going on until Striker started pouring a white powder into a small bag filled with liquid. He popped a tiny capsule inside the bag and immediately the clear liquid turned blue.

“Well, look at what we have there,” he said, holding the bag up to my line of sight. “Cocaine.”

“What? Wait, this is my girlfriend's car!”

“Son, the car is registered in your name and you're the one in possession of the vehicle. I don't know your girlfriend or what she's been doing, but you're in possession of drugs – and this isn't your first time either.”

I heaved a sigh – unfortunately, I remembered this one. Right after I had returned to the US with the other guys from Germany, Justin and I had both been arrested for drug possession.

We were stupid kids. We were so young and had spent a long time overseas being in a wildly popular band, only to come back to the US and be nothing. We hadn't gotten to be normal teenagers like our friends, and we related to each other because of our close age. We went out one night and tried marijuana.

Even that short of time ago, marijuana was a huge deal in the US. We both agreed after we tried it that we didn't like it, and decided to never do it again. Unfortunately I had been pulled over that night for speeding, and we were arrested for the possession of the leftover marijuana and being under the influence.

We spent a couple of hours in a police station that night before someone came to get us. We were never booked since it was a first for both of us, and Justin was under the legal age so it got wiped off his record when he turned eighteen. I was over eighteen though, so it stayed on my record. Our management was able to keep it completely silenced since we hadn't blown up in the US yet, but it looked like it was about to come back to bite me.

“This has to be over half a gram of cocaine, son,” he said, holding up the plastic bag. “Not only is this possession but it could border on intent to sell depending on how much you have here. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to arrest you and take you in.”

I think I knew the minute he pulled the paper bag out of the car that I would end up being arrested, but it finally started to sink in when he said it. I couldn't even decide whether to be mad or not; all I knew was that I couldn't believe it was happening now.

Both cops were silent for a bit, and I didn't even pay attention to what they were doing until I felt Officer Colton grab my right arm and bring it behind my back to cuff me.

“This is unbelievable,” I mumbled almost silently as I listened to him read me my rights. I felt him put the cuffs on me and tighten them enough that my hands couldn't slip out. When he was done, he led me over to the cop car and helped me inside the back.

“Officer Striker is going to finish a full search on your car, then we'll get you to the station and get you processed as soon as we can.”

He stopped for a moment and looked at me, acting like he wanted to apologize for the way things had turned out, but he went completely silent before closing the car door on me.

As I watched them finish searching my car, I could only think of how surprising it would be to Joey to get a phone call from me from jail and how Brayden had screwed me over without even being around this time. My hatred for her had only grown since this morning, and I had a feeling it hadn't reached its peak yet.

Chapter 3

I spent at least an hour in the police station before I was finally booked and allowed to have a phone call. The only person I knew I could call was Joey; he had my lawyer's number so he was able to call him on my behalf, and he needed to know where I was anyway, since he was probably expecting me to show up on his doorstep any time.

They threw me inside a holding cell with a large cement block for a seat. Luckily it was still early morning and they hadn't booked a lot of people yet, so I was only stuck inside with one other guy. He didn't look at all like he belonged here either.

I must have sat on that cement block for another hour, staring at a single letter in some scratched-in graffiti on the wall, before another cop came to the cell door.

“You have a visitor, and your lawyer is on his way down. Let's go,” he said as he unlocked the cell.

“Am I going to get bailed out soon?”

“You'll have to speak to your lawyer about that one.”

He escorted me without cuffs down to a silent interrogation room and left almost immediately, leaving me alone in the room. I laid my head down on the table and waited at least five minutes. Exhaustion had hit me again and my body temperature was rising. The metal was cool on my skin and I could feel myself getting ready to slip off to sleep when I heard the door open.

The same cop who had brought me in led Joey into the room and nodded his head before he closed the door, leaving the two of us alone. Joey stood for a second looking at me.

“Well, this is weird.”

I stared at him with blank eyes as he looked back at me.

“I'm sorry, man. That's all I could think of to say. I mean...what the hell happened? I just talked to you a couple of hours ago.”

“I don't know, Joey,” I said with a sigh as he sat down across from me. “They found drugs. I didn't even fucking know she was doing drugs!” I slammed my palm down on the table, finally feeling my anger coming out.

“Calm down,” he said. “Getting angry probably won't help you any.”

“I guess you're right.”

“I had a feeling Bray was doing something from the way she was acting. That's not Brayden; at least not normal Brayden.”

“How the hell didn't I know, Joe?” I asked. “I lived with her, I had a child with her, I slept with her every night in the same bed, or at least on the nights she was home – she was going out and spending hours at a time away from us, coming home and acting strange. How could I not know?”

“Well, you loved her. When you love people you don't always see when something is a little off.”

“I still love her Joey,” I admitted. “I hate her but I love her. Way more than I should.”

“Sometimes love isn't enough, Lance,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.

He paused, and seeing the change in my facial expressions he changed the subject.

“It's already on TMZ,” he said. “You're the big story.”

“Great. Because this couldn't get any worse, right?”

“Your mom called. She saw it.”

“I was wrong again,” I said. “That's fantastic.”

“She's flipped out, she's going crazy because they mentioned drugs. I don't know how they found out, the crafty son of a bitches. Anyway, she was going on and on about how she didn't even see it, how could she not know, how long has this been going on. I told her the story about Bray and how everything must have been hers, but I don't know if she believes me.”

“My father is going to fucking kill me...”

“Lance, you're 32 years old, you have a daughter, and you just got arrested for drug possession,” he said. “I think your father should be the least of your worries right now.”

I sighed. He was right, I was a grown man now. I wasn't that nineteen-year-old kid in the police station for a little weed anymore. This time, it was a little more serious.

“All I can say is, you're lucky I had Bailey, not you.”

I felt like a little kid getting scolded for stealing a candy bar or something; in some instances, Joey tended to get fatherly on me, since he was older than me.

“I'm curious, though – why didn't you have her? I mean, why didn't you take her with you when you left?”

“She is her mother, Joey.” I knew all too well what Joey was insinuating; he had never liked Bray much. He felt something was 'off' with her from the beginning. “You tried to warn me,” I said quietly. “You tried to tell me and I was too damn stupid to listen to you.”

Things went silent and uncomfortable again. Things between Joey and myself were hardly ever silent.

“This is probably the last thing I should tell you,” he finally said, “but when I went to pick up Bailey, Bray had a...visitor.”

“A visitor?”

“A friend, if you know what I mean.”

Within seconds, I could feel all the rage I had left over from last night and this morning come to the surface.

“Who?”

Joey averted my eyes and stayed silent.

“Who, Joey?”

“Her friend,” he said after a pause. “Jay, Jason, whatever his name is.”

“Jason, the model from her agency?”

“Lance.” He raised his eyebrows. “That guy is no model. He looks like he just stepped off the streets yesterday. If that guy is a model, I'll eat my own shirt. She played you again.”

Thinking about it without a smoke screen, I knew he was right. Jason was a chain smoker, constantly with a cigarette in his mouth. I couldn't count the times that he had come over to visit Bray and I'd had to chase him outside before he lit a cigarette in my house. The guy had dreadlocks that reached almost all the way down his back, and wore ripped jeans, not as a fashion statement but as a necessity. He didn't like me much, and I had assumed it was because I wasn't exactly the type of people he usually hung around. Now I wondered if that was the only reason, and how long it had been going on.

“Well, regardless, it's over,” I said, mostly in response to my own questions. “I'm done with her.”

“I think that's the wisest decision you've made yet.”

I looked up at the voice in the doorway and saw my lawyer closing the door, dressed in his business suit and clutching his briefcase as usual.

“Hello, Joey,” he said. “How's your new baby doing? And your wife?”

“All good, Rich, except for the lack of sleep, that is.”

“That's good.” He looked over at me and stopped. “I'd ask you how you were doing Lance, but I assume I already know the answer to that.”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly.

“You have yourself quite the conundrum here.” He sat down in the chair exactly opposite of me, right next to Joey. “You didn't have enough on you for them to throw on intent to sell, so that's a good thing. Unfortunately, that's about the only good news I have for you.”

I glanced at Joey, who was looking at my lawyer with the same expression that I felt – panic.

“I'm going to get bail though, right?” I said.

“If you were in here for beating the crap out of your crazy girlfriend, I'd say yeah, probably – for this, well, it will all depend.” When he saw even more panic in my eyes, he stood up out of his seat. “These aren't your mother's drug laws. Times have changed, my friend. We have this thing called the War on Drugs now.”

Richard had been my attorney a long time, and he had become a good friend of mine. I had rarely had to use him for anything serious like this, though, and I wasn't sure what exactly I was up against.

“Being caught with drugs is enough to get you time. Possession is a very open window. Possession doesn't mean consumption. The definition of possession in the law is the actual holding or occupancy of an item on your person, either with or without rights of ownership. The person holding the item in question is the one they charge with the crime. If they had caught Bray with the drugs, I'd be standing here talking to her. If Joey had borrowed your car because his was broken down and they had pulled him over, I'd be talking to him.”

“What does that mean, though?” I said. “Can't they test me? I'll come out negative and they'll know it's not me.”

“That means nothing. Possession does not mean consumption. People who are doing drugs pass piss tests all the time, unfortunately. Passing one only means you can't be charged for being under the influence, not that you weren't still in possession of it.”

“They weren't mine,” I stressed.

“Well unfortunately, your girlfriend isn't falling all over herself to cop to them, either.”

I sighed. “But I'm going to get out of here, right?”

“They weren't his, Rich,” Joey said. “Sure, it looks bad, I'll give you that. But there has to be something you can do.”

“Boys,” Rich said. “I have to level with you, because I like you both. They're going to give you a judge who has been extremely vocal about his frustrations with celebrities and crime. You can blame Lindsay 'Fuck-Up' Lohan for a lot of it. The public is getting tired of seeing celebrities that their children look up to and glamourize getting caught doing these kinds of things and getting off with not much more than a slap on the wrist for it. It doesn't help that you were in a popular boy band around the time that Lindsay's star rose as well. Fair or not, the public is going to recognize this and file you away as another child star gone bad, like her.”

“What are you saying?” I asked him, getting angry.

“I'm saying that you have the option to go to arraignment and plead not guilty, but that means you're going to go to trial. Then you're at the mercy of a court judge, and a jury who is probably going to be full of parents like that. You could get away with a slap on the wrist, who knows. But with the previous arrest on your record, which will be admissible in your trial, I don't think I would want to take the chance if I were you.”

“Are you telling him he should plead guilty?” Joey asked, shocked.

“Rich,” I said, “that's crazy! I am not a drug addict. The only time I've touched anything was that one time with Justin, and yeah, it was stupid, but it was experimentation. That was a long time ago. How can you say I should plead guilty when I'm not?”

“I'm thinking about your daughter,” he said, sitting down across from me again. “Lance, you're not understanding that if you go to trial and get convicted, you're looking at five, maybe even ten years. And I'm almost certain you'll get convicted,” he stressed. “I told you, these aren't your mother's drug laws anymore. I don't think you want to be away from your daughter for ten damn years.”

It hit me that this was more serious than I had even imagined. I looked over at Joey, who looked like he was feeling exactly the way I was. The mood in the room had completely turned sour.

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

“This is drugs, not murder. They don't do fingerprints or DNA on drugs. Possession really is nine-tenths of the law, and this is why innocent people go to prison every day. If you agree to plead, I can get you a deal. I've already talked to the DA, and the only thing I read from her is that she's a shark who is looking to make an example out of you because kids will pay attention to you.”

“I have no other options, do I?” I said after a long silence.

“If you do, I don't see them.”

The two of us looked at each other, waiting for the other to say something. I couldn't say anything. I wanted to cry, honestly.

“I can have you home in a year, two tops. You have to trust me, Lance.”

I broke eye contact with Rich and looked at Joey, who said nothing but only slightly nodded his head. Even he knew it was the right thing to do, deep inside. What Rich said made sense. The public held celebrities up to such a high standard that one mistake, even a small one, was a huge deal. Even I had to admit that sometimes it was out of control, but it sure wasn't fair right now.

I knew I was innocent. Even my lawyer knew I was innocent. I had no options; if I was blue collar, a normal person, I could have been going home today with probation or community service. Even rehab would be better than going to prison. And I didn't understand my celebrity position, because those normal people often got off with only a slap on the wrist, too. I'd heard news stories before of repeat offenders who had convictions in the double-digits and were still only getting small sentences, some of them even probation.

Why was I the exception to the rule? Why was I the one celebrity they chose to make an example out of? Somebody needed to do it, yes, but why did it have to be me? I had one silly mark on my record. Some celebrities had dozens.

Unfortunately for me, my innocence wouldn't matter. My lawyer had made that quite clear to me.

“I'll do it,” I said, barely above a whisper.

Rich looked at me with sympathetic eyes for a few seconds, then looked away.

“Arraignment is in an hour. They want to get you processed quickly so there's not much of a media rush. I'll have everything ready by then.”

He quietly started gathering up his briefcase.

“What will happen to Bailey?” I asked him somberly.

“What do you mean?”

“Brayden is the one on drugs,” I said. “I may be going down for this, but there's no way in hell I'm going to let Bailey go down, too. I want her out of that house.”

“Brayden will have custody of her, unless you can prove that she's an unfit mother. Since the closest blood relative you have is in Mississippi and Brayden's mother lives in California, you could petition the courts to have temporary custody handed over to Joey and Kelly.”

“How do I do that?”

“Well, first you'll have to prove Brayden is unfit to care for her, and get child services to remove her from her care. That will be the hardest part, most times they favor the mother, even when it should be the other way around. Once you get around that battle, you'll have to relinquish your parental rights and petition the courts to transfer third-party custody to Kelly and Joey. You'll have to prove that keeping Bailey in New York with a third-party is in her best interest, better than being sent off to another state. That will be a battle in itself, because the courts don't like to send children to non-blood relatives when there are blood relatives able to care for the child. I think if Joey and I work together though, we can get it done.”

He and Joey exchanged a glance.

“Whatever it takes,” Joey said. “I don't want Bailey in that house either.”

“If I relinquish my parental rights,” I said with a sigh, because the thought scared me more than going to prison. “Will I be able to get them back?”

“Your main concern right now should be getting her out,” he said, and it scared me that he didn't answer my question outright. “I'm not going to tell you no, but I'm not willing to say yes either. In the eyes of the court, you may end up being as unfit as Brayden.”

I looked him in the eyes again, clearly showing him how upset I was right now, and shook my head in disbelief.

“I told you,” he said. “You have to trust me. I will do whatever it is within my power to get you out as quickly as possible and get your daughter back to you. If I have to hand-fucking-deliver all the papers myself, that is what I will do.”

I should have said something, but I couldn't speak. I couldn't even look at either of them. All I could think about was where I was going from here.

“I'll leave you two alone for a bit. I'll see you in an hour, Lance.”

Rich picked up his briefcase and stood up, shaking Joey's hand and patting him on the shoulder before he walked out the door. After he left, Joey stared at me, wanting me to say something, but I couldn't.

“Do whatever it takes to get custody of her, Joey,” I said after a long silence. “I want her out of that house and away from Bray.”

“She'll be coming to pick her back up tonight,” he said. “I can't keep her, she was already talking about reporting me for kidnapping when I came to pick her up. For all I know, she already did. But I'm going to want to kill her when she comes by.”

“That won't help me. I'm in here; I need you out there. Somebody has to be there for Bailey, because I can't be.”

“I'll do whatever it takes. Hell, I will kidnap her if that's what it takes. And I'm here for you, too. You know I'll do anything for you.”

Things went silent again in the room for a while, and now I could barely contain tears. It was hard to tell yourself that “real” men didn't cry when you were looking at this.

“Lance,” he said, and I looked up at him. “I'm sorry. We'll get through this, okay? I'll keep Rich on speed dial. I'll call the rest of the guys after arraignment and I'll let them know what's going on. It's not only me on your side, you have all of us. We'll all do whatever it takes to get you through this and get you out.”

“Thanks,” I whispered, and I felt the tears start coming out. I felt the anger and disappointment, and I felt a little bit of fear slip through, too. I wasn't what I considered a “tough” guy; there were people who were probably tough enough for prison but I wouldn't consider myself one of them. It wasn't the people I was afraid of; mostly it was being sedentary and alone. Twenty-three hours a day, alone in a small room, and I didn't think I could handle that.

I brought the heels of my palms up to both my eyes, pretending I was rubbing my eyes, but I knew Joey knew I was crying. I didn't care if he knew, he wouldn't think any less of me for it. If I felt no love or compassion from anybody else right now, I felt it from him.

A few moments later, the cop returned to escort me back. He let me briefly say goodbye to Joey, and he returned me to a different holding cell this time. I was alone in this one, but this time I didn't count myself thankful. I wanted to be around people, regardless of what kind of people they were. I wanted to be social while I still had a chance.

Chapter 4

The first three hours of prison were the worst, definitely. My arraignment and the waiting all went by in a big blur. Luckily, the guards who took me out of arraignment brought me out through some kind of secret exit so there was no media or cameras around to harass me. I was a “special” case – normally I'd have waited around the jail until they were ready for a transport that day, but they wanted me out as soon as possible so I was transported right away.

When the transport van pulled up to the prison, it was exactly like you'd expect it to be from seeing it in a movie – a gray, concrete building surrounded by fencing and a dark gray sky. This morning the sky had been a cheery blue, but now it looked like it would dump an early October snow on us. It was strange how it had changed so drastically, and so fittingly.

Those three hours that followed were the ones that were the worst. I was fingerprinted, palm-printed, made to undress and endure a humiliating and violating strip search. Of course, it was policy that it had to be a man. That was probably the worst, and what made it so embarrassing. It made me realize exactly what I had to be afraid of by being here.

I had been sent to Warren Correctional, a male-only facility about an hour outside of New York City. I had heard of the place a few times, but I never kept up on New York prisons so it was only a blip on my radar until now. It was no Riker's Island; it was a minimum-security prison, so the worst offenders were sent there. It was still a prison though, and everybody knew the stereotypes of what happened in prisons.

Once the humiliating parts were over, I changed into the outfit they issued me; a dark gray shirt and pants, with 853479 in big stenciled letters on the left breast of the shirt. This was my inmate number, my identity now, for the next two years. I wasn't Lance anymore, and I wished that whoever this inmate 853479 was didn't have to be in Lance's body.

After I dressed, the male guard that had been with me the whole time handcuffed me again and took me down a hall. At the end of it was a desk, where a robust African-American female guard was sitting, typing away at a computer like a secretary.

“Got a new one, Roberta,” he said. Aside from telling me where to put my hands, which way to turn, and giving me other instructions, he hadn't spoken a lot the whole time I'd been with him.

“Yeah, I've heard about this one,” she said. “You aren't going to give me trouble, are you?”

I shook my head no. I had enough trouble already, I didn't need even more today.

“Okay,” she said skeptically, and stood up out of the chair and walked over to me. “I'll take you to your cell.”

The male guard took over her place at the desk and she walked with me down another hall.

“Lights go on at six every morning, and they go out at ten every night,” she said, not looking me in the eyes. “Breakfast is at seven and every inmate has breakfast in their cell. Lunch is at noon, and you can either eat in the chow hall or stay in your cell, your choice. Dinner's at six. We've assigned you to protective custody, since you're a special case. Yard for that hall is twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, before dinner. Keep your nose to the ground and out of trouble and you'll stay in protective custody. If we have any problems out of you, we'll send you to segregation, and I guarantee that's not a place you'll like. Got that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“In the future, the respectful way to address a guard is 'Yes, CO.' Respect us around here and we'll respect you. Understood?”

She was friendly about it, not authoritative. “Yes, CO.”

“Good. I know that sucks, but you just have to get used to things like that around here. Now, we have a library available to all the inmates and as long as you stay out of Seg, you're free to go to the library whenever you'd like with a guard escort. You can check out one book at a time. We have a commissary in Adams Hall, as long as you have money in your account you can buy things they don't have in the chow hall. And if you ever need it, we have a full-time infirmary unit on staff. Head nurse is Abby Howell. I think you'll like her.”

I looked over at her, at the same time she looked at me and smiled a little.

“All the inmates like Abby. She relates to them in a way that the guards don't, and she's nice to them. It doesn't hurt that she's young and pretty, either.”

We came to two large doors, and she opened one of them and ushered me through, closing it behind her. Beyond the doors was another big hall, where I finally saw all the cells lined up.

“This is Baker Hall, otherwise known as protective custody. This will be your new home for the rest of your stay – if you behave yourself, that is.”

I had thought that reality had sunk in long before now, but the feeling when I first stepped into this hall was intense. The hall was long and seemed like nothing but cells with iron bars. It was a lot like staring at the Grand Canyon – miles and miles of rock, but it gave you that feeling deep in your gut knowing that it was much more than rock. Only this was a bad feeling.

Hearing the hall doors open stirred the prisoners apparently, because some of them came to their cell bars to stare as we walked down the hall. I knew they weren't looking at the guard, they were looking at me. I couldn't imagine what they were thinking about me, and I didn't think I wanted to.

“Got a new neighbor for you, Damian,” she said as she walked up to one of the cells and pulled out her keys.

I heard a scuffling and saw an African-American man walking towards the bars on his cell, right next to what would be mine. From what I could see, he looked to be about my age, probably a little younger.

“Oh yeah? That's good, it was starting to get lonesome around here.”

“You need to quit running them off,” she responded. “You jabber your mouth so much, I'm starting to think they get in trouble just to get sent to Seg to get away from you.”

“Now CO, don't be like that. You know I'm the charming one around here.”

She gently led me into the cell and pulled the bars closed, and started locking it back up.

“Yeah, Damian, we know. You're good people, but you never shut your mouth long enough to get in trouble, that's your problem.”

“Hey, good problem to have if you ask me, right?”

“Around here, better problem than most,” she said. “Try your best not to scare the new kid away from you, got it Damian? This isn't social playtime.”

“Yes, CO,” he said, very enthusiastically and from what I could tell, jokingly.

“You behave,” she said, pointing at him. Then she turned back to me. “If you need anything, ask for CO Daniels, that's me. I'm in this hall a lot, I'll try to get you what you need, okay?”

I nodded, because it was about all I could muster, and she nodded back understandingly and walked away, keys jangling on her belt.

I was surprised at what I'd experienced here so far, I hadn't expected the guards to be so nice. Maybe they had seen a lot of the inmates come in feeling out of place like I did. Then again, I had only met two of the guards so far; I couldn't rule out the possibility that there were some that wouldn't be that nice.

I took a second to glance at my surroundings. The cell was about as small as I had imagined, probably no bigger than six foot from bars to the small window across from it. Bailey's room was bigger than this – hell, my guest bathroom was even bigger than this. Of course, there was the obligatory toilet in the corner, with no options for privacy, and a sink next to that. Right next to the double-bunk bed was an empty counter, and what its purpose was I couldn't figure out. On the opposite side of the wall was a small desk and a chair. I was trying to figure out how they fit so much stuff into such a small place.

“Looks bigger once you take all the stuff out of it,” I heard a voice say. “You'd think since they're required to give us so much necessary junk they could at least give us a little bit more cell to fit it all in.”

The voice sounded like it belonged to the inmate next door, but it sounded like he was standing right inside my cell, so I looked around to see how he was carrying his voice so far.

“Over here, look beside your desk,” he said.

I walked over to the desk and looked down, and I saw a covered vent a few inches off the floor.

“This is how we talk around here. Not all the cells have this, but the ones who do take advantage of it.”

“How'd you know I was looking around?” I asked.

“I was new once, too,” he said with a laugh. “I've seen lots of new kids come through here. Not a lot of them look like you, though. You look pretty fresh to a place like this, so I assumed you'd be looking around, feeling the place out.”

I suddenly realized I was exhausted, so I sat down on the floor in a small space between the bars and the vent.

“So, what you in protective custody for? You not a child molester, are you?” he asked.

“No,” I said assertively.

“Then, what you in PC for, man?”

“A lot of people know me,” I said.

“No offense, but you don't look like no gang member or anything,” he said.

I shook my head. “I'm not.”

“You don't look like you even belong here, brother. I mean, you all clean cut and shit, know what I mean?”

I didn't say anything, but I heard a little chuckle from him.

“I guess that's what we all say though, huh?”

Things went silent again, and I laid the back of my head against the wall.

“You one of those quiet ones, huh?” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“That's cool. You can ignore me. I like to talk to people, you know? Even if they ain't listening to me. This place can get so lonely you think you gonna go nuts sometimes. Makes it feel like there's someone there, even if there ain't.”

I wondered if eventually I would get so lonely that I would start talking to people even though I knew they weren't listening to me.

“What's your name at least? If we're gonna be neighbors, it'd be cool to at least know your name.”

“Lance.”

“I'm Damian.” I saw a dark hand reach out of the next cell and close to mine, reaching out for a handshake. I reached my hand out of the bars and grabbed his, and shook it. When he released my hand, he balled up his fist, so I did the same and he bumped his fist against mine.

“Everybody calls me Little D. You know, gotta have the nickname if you from the ghetto and stuff. You obviously ain't from the ghetto, so you wouldn't know that.” He chuckled again. “That's probably about as much skin-to-skin human contact you gonna get for the next few months, so better get used to that.”

“Are we even supposed to talk like this?”

“Not really, but they don't care much as long as you're not causing trouble or passing kites.”

“Kites?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, notes.” He paused. “You really are fresh, aren't you?”

“I guess so.”

“This is your first time in prison, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” I said with a sigh.

“No worries, Little D will educate you on the finer and not-so-finer points of prison.” He said it with such attitude that it almost made me laugh. “First of all, stay away from the prison gangs. They'll gain you nothing but trouble, man. Don't believe all the bullshit they tell you about how they can protect you either. And watch your back. You're new here. Not to further stereotypes, because I hate that shit – but you're new, you're white, and you're a pretty boy. No offense or anything, I'm not saying that 'cause I don't like you or nothing, I'm just telling you the truth. Hate and racism runs rampant around this place, guys like you are seen as fresh meat around this place.”

“That's what scares me,” I said.

“It should scare you. Most of these guys in here have years on you. We're in prison; sometimes you have to do what you have to do. That's the truth. Protect your own life, but don't cause unnecessary drama for yourself – PC is pretty nice, you don't even want to see what Seg is like.”

“Everybody's been talking about 'Seg'. What is Seg?”

“Administrative Segregation, otherwise known as solitary confinement. They don't use solitary anymore, Ad Seg sounds nicer. No reason to call it what it is. They lock you in a cell consisting of 99% concrete, with only a plexiglass window to view the world outside your cell. You're there twenty-three hours a day with nobody to talk to. Guys have gone crazy in there, man.”

“Have you been to Seg before?”

“Twice this visit,” he said. “Spent about half my stay there, and I don't intend to go back and make it more. Maybe that's why I like to talk so much out here.”

“How long have you been here, Damian?”

“Call me D,” he said. “I've been here five years now. And that's only this stay. I still got a couple more years to go. I've spent probably half my life in and out of juvie and prison.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

I let it soak in for a few seconds; at twenty-six, all I was dealing with was paparazzi and media harassment, and I'd thought I'd had it rough for someone my age.

“What are you in here for?” I asked.

“I got a problem with drugs,” he said. “Seems drugs like to follow me around wherever I go. That's kind of why I'm here in PC; I turned from a dealer to a snitch, and that's how a lot of the people who don't like me ended up here. Then I got caught myself. I keep out of trouble for the most part in here, but I don't think I know how to stay out of trouble out there.”

Things fell silent for a moment; I was still trying to soak in the fact that he was only twenty-six years old.

“Anyway, that's enough school for today,” he said, and I heard the scuffling of him standing up. “I don't want to overwhelm you on your first day. Don't concern yourself with the problems of the world. Just concern yourself with yourself. Try to mind your own damn business and watch your back. If you do that, you might make it out no worse for the wear.”

I looked at my surroundings again, remembering all the things Damian had schooled me on. I wanted to stay in protective custody, because it seemed like the best place to be if I didn't want any problems. I had an ally, or at the very least a mentor. I didn't feel as alone as I had this morning. Now that I was here and I knew I'd be staying a while, I had to keep myself out of trouble if I wanted to make it out.

Chapter 5

Tuesday rolled around slowly, but it gave me a chance to get a good grip on my surroundings. The rest of Saturday, and all of Sunday and Monday, I had stayed inside my cell exclusively, because I was too uncomfortable being outside of it. I was starting to get used to my new neighbor, though; Damian talked a lot, and mostly I listened and responded when I needed to. But I hadn't gotten sick of him yet, and he was the closest thing to a friend that I had inside this cement-lined hole, so it didn't take long before I was comfortable with him.

I was still too uncomfortable with the other inmates though, and afraid of facing any of them, so Damian and I both ate all our meals inside our cells and kept each other company. The food was awful, and by far the least tolerable part. I knew coming in that I wasn't going to be eating five-star food, but I hadn't prepared myself for it being so bad that cardboard sounded more appetizing.

“You could starve to death around here,” Damian told me at dinner the first night, all the while scarfing down his food like the family dog would snag it if he didn't. “They shouldn't bother with the death penalty – if the food don't kill ya, the hunger will. You'll get used to it, you'll just have to get hungry enough first.”

“I think I'd rather eat my own arm off,” I had responded, staring at the disgusting mess in front of me. That night I'd gone to bed pretty hungry and irritable. Not that it did me any good, because I found out that night that it wasn't easy to sleep in a prison. During the day, the prison was loud and rather obnoxious, but after the lights went out it quieted down and all you could hear was the occasional jangle of a guard's keys as he walked, or the echo of another inmate from farther down the hall. The quiet bothered me too much; if it got too quiet, it felt like something would pop out from behind me to take me by surprised.

What I still had to get used to was the fact that I should have expected all of this coming in. I had expected it to be terrifying before I got here, but all of this was completely foreign to me. Prison wasn't meant to be comfortable. It was supposed to be punishment and a deterrent to bad behavior. Who would want to come back to a place with bad food, a hard bed, and anxiety waiting around every corner?

My anxiety level wasn't the only thing that was “off” either. It had only been a couple days since I told Joey I was definitely done with Brayden, and I hadn't been able to think about anything else but her since I got here. My heart wanted to know where she was and what she was doing, but my head screamed at me, pissed off because it didn't want to know and didn't care.

“You're thinking too much, man.”

I looked next to me and saw Damian looking straight ahead at some inmates playing basketball in the exercise yard.

“Do me a favor,” I mumbled to him. “Stay out of my head.”

“That's all you've been doing since you got here – thinking,” he responded. “You can think in your cell. Enjoy the beautiful day. Before you know it, winter's gonna set in and this yard won't be so pleasant.”

It was a beautiful day outside, warm even for this early in October and the sun was high in the sky on this side of the yard. A lot of the inmates were wearing t-shirts and enjoying the sun, including Damian – but instead of seeing the beautiful weather, all I could see was the constricting fence around us and my prison-issued suit.

“It doesn't really matter,” I said. “I only get to enjoy the outside twice a week for the next year – or more.”

“All the more reason you should appreciate it, then.”

I looked over at him straight-faced, and watched him stare at me as he pulled a cigarette seemingly out of thin air.

“Your choice, I guess.” He popped his cigarette in his mouth and flicked a lighter a few times before it came to life. “You gotta realize that you gotta take advantage of these small amenities instead of moping around, feeling sorry for yourself that you don't get more of them. It sucks, but this ain't your old life anymore – not for a while, at least.”

I stayed silent for a while, but one question lingered on my mind.

“Where the hell did you manage to get a cigarette anyway?” I asked. “Not to mention a lighter. Can't you get in trouble for having that stuff?”

“Why? You want one?” he asked, the sparkle back in his eyes.

“Hell no,” I said. “I don't smoke. Don't you know that'll kill you?”

He smiled and blew a ring of smoke in my direction, and I waved it away with my hand.

“I have my ways of getting things I want and getting away with it. And besides, I'm in prison. What makes you think I'm conscious of my health?”

He exhaled the rest of the smoke from his mouth and chuckled as I rolled my eyes and looked away from him, then one of his friends called his name and he turned his attention away.

I stared back in front of me, watching the guys in the yard and thinking about what Damian had said. He was right, this wasn't my old life anymore. I had spent a lot of time the past couple of years feeling sorry for myself because of how my old life was turning out, not even realizing that I didn't have it half as bad as I could have.

This was bad; this was hopelessness. I had lost my faith in everything.

“Take a walk with me,” Damian said after a few moments, cigarette still hanging loosely out of his mouth. He stood up and took one last puff of it before throwing it down to the ground and grinding it out with his foot.

“Come on. Get up.” He stared at me for a few seconds with a questioning look, before I finally stood up and followed him with heavy footsteps.

“Look, I know things aren't great,” he finally said after a few steps. “But damn. You're so depressed that you're bringing the whole place down a notch – and that's a feat here. What's got you down so much?”

“Take a look around you, Damian. What do you think has me down?”

“It ain't just that,” he said. “Look at you, and look around at most of the other guys here. This is your first time in some real big trouble. You ain't like these guys. You're gonna get out, and you know how to stay out. The way you've been acting, one might think you on death row or something.”

I shrugged my slumped shoulders. “It's depressing. I'm not like you, Damian. This is not who I am.”

“It may not be who you were,” he said. “But it's who you are now and for the next couple years, whether you like it or not.”

He was trying to help, but talk about someone being down – he wasn't helping.

“What'd you think, you were going to come in here and live your life like normal? That everybody was going to treat you special 'cause of who you are? Who you think you are, Martha Stewart?”

“You know who I am?” I looked at him, a little surprised. I had told him people knew me the day I first got here, but I hadn't yet told him how people knew me.

“Of course I know,” he said, almost scoffing. “I knew before you even got here. This may be a prison full of guys, but when you got nothing better to talk about gossip tends to go around. I pretended I didn't know, because I thought if you felt anonymous you might feel more comfortable.”

“I'm not going to feel comfortable whether people know me or not,” I said, hanging my head again.

“Well, that ain't the only thing people know about you. Most of us know what your girl did to you. It ain't right,” he said. “Ain't right at all.”

“The most fucked up part is that I still love her.”

“Nah, that's not fucked up,” he said. “Y'all got a daughter. You're supposed to love her. The most fucked up part is that she's supposed to love you – and when you love someone, you don't do that to them.”

When he put it that way, I realized I had everything backwards – all this time I had been questioning what I had done wrong to make her act the way she was, when I had been doing everything right. She was the one who had been doing everything wrong.

“Relationships might be nice if they were like those songs you sang with that band. Unfortunately for us, they're not.”

“I assume you don't have a girlfriend,” I said.

“I got a sweet woman back home,” he said with a smile. “She's a good woman – but there ain't a person in this world who compares to my momma.”

That was another thing I had been thinking about lately – my mother, and how disappointed she had to have been in me.

“What's she like, Damian?”

“Well...she ain't much of a homemaker, but my momma's a damn fine cook,” he said. “She's a good Christian woman, southern at heart. I don't think I've ever seen a Sunday that she wasn't in church. That woman is a saint to put up with my ass.”

“Do you think she's ever disappointed in you?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said after a pause. “I think she got over that a long time ago. At first she was – I think that poor woman wore out her mouth with all the Hail Mary's she said for me. But then she started accepting it, and forgave herself for it because she realized it wasn't her fault. Now she prays for me; prays for me to be safe, prays for me to get out...hell, maybe she prays for Jesus to save my poor soul. I don't know.”

The conversation between Damian and I had pretty much halted right there. He rarely talked through dinner in our cells again later that evening, until I mentioned that I had a headache.

“I got something for that,” he said, and he went silent again. I didn't even hear him looking through his cell, until I saw him drop something into my cell from the slightly opened vent.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Let's just say it'll take care of your headache, and maybe your ass will finally get some sleep tonight.”

Curiously, I walked over and grabbed the small package – a coffee filter fashioned into a little pouch, with a little string tied around it to keep it closed. I unwrapped the string and opened the filter and saw several round, white pills.

“What is this stuff?” I asked him through the vent, in a low voice so we wouldn't alert any guards. “Where'd you get this?”

“Man, quit being nosy and get your ass to bed,” he said. “All you need to know I already told you – it'll take care of your headache and you will get some sleep tonight. The less you know about it the better – for me, and for you.”

It took all of three seconds for me to realize that that philosophy was probably best to live by for a while, and I wrapped the pills back in the coffee filter and shoved the whole thing under my mattress.

I laid on the uncomfortable bed for a while, completely silent while I listened to the sounds outside of my cell and Damian's tossing and turning turn into rhythmic breathing. Normally he had more problems falling asleep; he must have found solace in the mystery pills tonight, too.

He had given me a lot of things to think about. On one hand, I thought that I had an absolute right to feel sorry for myself. Feeling sorry for myself was honestly the only right that hadn't been taken away from me yet, and I'd had so much taken away that all I felt capable of right now was wallowing in self-pity.

On the other hand, he was right – in every corner of this prison I could find a man whose life was much worse than my own right now. Damian and I had talked about many things the past few days as I was getting used to the boredom I was experiencing, and he'd told me some of the stories of the men he knew in this prison. All I knew were nicknames, otherwise they were all nameless and faceless, but the stories of how they had ended up here and what they had lost horrified me.

There were numerous men who were supposed to be out many years ago, with ten-year sentences that dragged into twenty or twenty-five because of different behavioral issues that ended up ruining their chances of parole. Some of them weren't out yet, and most of them had no idea when they would be getting out. They only knew it probably wouldn't be any time soon.

There were the men with kids like me – only they didn't look forward to getting out in a couple of years to see their kids. Damian told me some of them had been here twenty years and most of their kids were grown up now. One had missed giving his daughter away at her wedding this past April; another got to see his son every week but only because his son was here in the same prison.

Then there was the one who had said goodbye to his son last month, when he was able to attend his funeral in handcuffs.

After that, I couldn't listen anymore.

I had no right to complain – but I still felt sorry for myself. I wouldn't be home for Thanksgiving this year, when Bailey and I always took a road trip back home to Mississippi to spend a week with my parents. I wouldn't be home for Christmas, or be able to take Bailey to see all the lights in New York, or see her face when the snow started falling. And I would have no chance of being there for her sixth birthday. I'd never get these years back.

And without Brayden, I had no idea where my future was headed. Clearly, I was going to lose custody of Bailey, and with no proof that Brayden was an unfit mother full custody would obviously go to her right away. One thing that Bray always held onto with a death grip was a grudge, and she had one against me now that I'd walked out on her. She never thought about anything but herself now, so of course she would use Bailey to hurt me, because she knew losing Bailey would be as close to ripping my heart out of my chest as she could get, without having to get blood on her hands.

I couldn't help but think that if I'd chosen not to leave, none of this would have happened. If I had stayed and stuck it out one more night like I had become accustomed to, maybe everything would be relatively normal. I could at least be at Joey's house now, tucking Bailey and Joey's girls into bed and reading them bedtime stories, instead of contemplating my own self-sympathy.

The tides had turned – a couple of days ago, I had been cursing at the idea of being up with a sick five-year-old and having to wait up until dawn for my girlfriend to come home. Now, I'd have given anything to have that night back, if only so I could go back and do things differently.

In my eyes, my life was in pure and utter shambles. There was a big, black cloud hanging right over my head. The problem was that I was the only one who could see it, because to everybody else I was the lucky one.

I wasn't feeling very “lucky” right now, though.

I reached down and lifted up my mattress, and pulled out the coffee filter again and looked it over. Maybe I really did need some sleep. I didn't think I could handle another night of laying here with my eyes wide open waiting for whatever monster was inside my head to pop out and get me.

I laid on my side and propped myself up with my elbow, and reached for a glass of water on the desk that I hadn't finished earlier. I peeled open the coffee filter and took two of the pills in my hand, and quickly put them in my mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of water before I lost my nerve and decided not to take them.

I don't know why I continued to look at the rest of the pills in the coffee filter, and I have no idea what compelled me to take the rest of the pills in my hand and swallow all of them. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions that you make when you don't want to waste time pondering over it.

I needed something to happen to pull me out of this, whatever it was going to end up being. So I decided to get off my bed and stand at my cell doors and wait for whatever that was going to be.

Chapter 6

I don't know whether I simply passed out, or whether something worse happened to me. The pills must have taken their effect on me shortly after my feet hit the floor because I didn't remember anything that happened after that, except for one thing – hearing a woman say “he'll be okay.”

She must have been right, because here I found myself, lying in a bed that was a thousand times more comfortable than the one in my cell. I wasn't even sure I was still in the prison. I was surrounded by off-white plastered walls instead of the dreary gray cement in my own cell. The lights were a hundred times brighter, too – or maybe it was just me, that I had passed out for so long and my eyes still had to adjust to real light.

My stomach felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. Every part of my body was sore, with the possible exception of my feet and toes. My abdomen was the worst – it was raw and hard as a rock.

I groaned and tried to throw my arm over to my stomach, but I was stopped by the handcuffs holding me to the bed rails.

“Well, you're awake.”

I turned my head in the direction I heard the voice, and saw a female looking at me from the other side of the room, wearing blue nurse's scrubs with a ponytail full of wavy, deep brunette hair.

“You got pretty violent with me last night,” she said as she grabbed a plastic cup from a table and walked to the sink. “It was only because you didn't want us poking and prodding at you, but you started scratching and biting, so we had to handcuff you.”

“Oh my God,” I said, horrified. Scratching and biting, me? It was just so unlike me. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay,” she said with a chuckle. “You're not the first guy who's tried to bite me in here.”

She walked over to me with the plastic cup in her hand. She smiled as she sat it down on a table next to me.

“How are you feeling this morning?”

“Like I've been swallowed and thrown back up a few times.”

“Well no offense, but you kind of look like it, too,” she said. “Of course that's usually what happens when you have to have your stomach pumped.”

She reached into one of the pockets of her scrub tops and pulled out a silver key, and held it in front of me.

“Promise not to try to bite me this time?” she said with a smile.

“I promise. I'm not really in the biting mood.”

“Good.” She put the key in the handcuffs and released my hand from them. “It'd be awfully awkward for me to have to handcuff you again – especially considering I like you so much.”

She reached for my arm and helped me into a sitting position on the bed, which I was grateful for because I was far too sore to manage getting there on my own. She grabbed the cup of water and handed it to me, and I took it without any hesitations.

“Are they going to put me in solitary?” I asked after I took a sip.

“For what?”

“For having drugs in my cell.”

She paused for a minute. “You nearly died twelve hours ago and your only concern is whether you're going to solitary?”

“I'm not dead, and the next worse thing would be solitary,” I responded simply.

“They're not putting you in solitary. But I'm putting you on suicide watch.”

“I wasn't trying to kill myself.”

“Really,” she said. “What were you hoping to accomplish by taking ten Oxycontin, then? Sweet dreams?”

I felt ashamed, like I couldn't even look her in the eyes. “I don't know what I was trying to do.”

“Just one question – why?”

Obviously she didn't believe that I wasn't trying to kill myself, and I didn't have an answer for that question because I wasn't even sure I believed myself.

“Why not?” I said.

“You know, most people don't have such a carefree attitude about their own lives.”

“Maybe I do.”

“That's funny, because Damian said yesterday out in the yard he had talked to you, and you were feeling much better.”

“I never said I was feeling any better,” I snapped at her. “It's really none of your business how I'm feeling, or what my attitude about my own life is. I know your intentions are good and you're trying to help, but I've been to hell in a fucking hand basket since I got here, and I could really go for skipping the come to Jesus meeting right now.”

She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders, but otherwise she looked unphased by my sudden attitude change.

“Fine. I just assumed that you'd like to talk about it to someone who might understand where you're coming from.”

“What makes you think that you have any idea where I'm coming from?”

“Because I heard what happened, or at least what the media and police say happened, and I don't believe it.” She said it nonchalantly, as if it was no big deal to her. “I got your number. And it isn't this one.”

She pointed to the stenciled number on my shirt, and I automatically looked down as if I didn't remember it was there. For a second, I almost had forgotten.

“So,” she said after I stayed silent, “why?”

“Why do you even care?”

“Because you almost died – in my hands, in my care,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “You may be okay with throwing your life away, but that's something I don't take lightly. The least you can repay me with is the knowledge of why you felt it so necessary to die last night.”

The room was quiet and serious; I just stared at her and she stared back at me, and nobody was budging.

“I want out,” I said as I looked her back in her eyes.

“You're not going anywhere.”

“No,” I said. “I want out. That's why I did it. I feel like this is all just one big, bad fucking nightmare, and I want out of it. Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my entire life, and I didn't even do anything to deserve this. I want out because in less than a week, I've managed to lose my girlfriend, my daughter, my freedom, and probably most of my friends, my house, and any future job opportunities I ever had. My fans will never trust me again. I've disgraced my family and my entire hometown. I want the nightmare to end.”

“You and every other man in here,” she responded. “So you went from the top to the bottom in a matter of a few days, and you think that's a good reason to completely end your life?”

“Maybe I do.”

I really didn't, but I was feeling combative. I didn't like this strange woman, the one who hadn't even introduced herself yet but I could only assume was the infamous nurse that “everyone” liked, telling me how wrong my actions were.

“Your fans are your fans for a reason,” she continued. “I'm sure you have no idea what they're thinking about you right now. Your family will love you no matter what, and I'm sure they know you better than to think that you're guilty of this. And what about your daughter? If you had died last night, what would have happened to her?”

At the mention of Bailey, my heart sank into my stomach.

“Yeah, most people don't think about that when they're only thinking of themselves,” she said.

“I thought I made it clear that I didn't feel like having a come to Jesus talk. I can't possibly understand why I've heard that the inmates trust you and like you, because I don't very much right now.”

“You don't like me because I'm telling you the truth right now. I'm not coddling you like all your friends and your handlers might, and it makes you angry because you're in a bad place. You should be thanking me for keeping your ass out of trouble, instead of angry that I'm telling you the truth.”

“Why would you be keeping me out of trouble?” I asked skeptically.

“You were in possession of at least ten Oxycontin that we know of. In here, that's enough to get you extra time for dealing. And the guards don't know where you got it from – you and Damian better be thankful that I'm not telling them.”

“You know?”

“Of course I know. The inmates like me and trust me for a reason. Damian told me he gave them to you. He knows I'm going to help you, and that I'm not going to tell, because I know he had good intentions.” She grabbed a coffee cup off her desk and took a drink out of it. “You should probably talk to him though. He feels pretty guilty that you almost died and he helped.”

I hadn't even considered that Damian might blame himself for my actions, because he was the one who gave me the pills. It was just another person to add to the list of people I had let down.

“I really wasn't trying to kill myself, you know,” I said.

“I fail to see what good you were trying to accomplish, then,” she said, setting her coffee back on her desk.

“Maybe it's hard for someone in your position to understand what I was trying to accomplish.”

“Make me understand, then,” she said, and sat down in the chair at her desk, watching me intently.

I stopped and sighed. It was hard to find the words for what I had been feeling, because it was so chaotic in my head right now that I barely understood it myself.

“Maybe I was just trying to make it all disappear for a night. One night.”

“I don't think that any amount of pills will help you with that,” she said.

The room went silent. Maybe she understood, maybe she didn't. Maybe she was just trying to give me some time to let the full extent of my actions soak in.

“I guess now that you're awake, I should check you over,” she said as she stood up. “Check your vitals and all that.”

I stayed silent, letting her do what she needed to do. She put her fingers on my wrist and looked at her watch. Her hand felt warm, because I hadn't noticed that the room was cold.

“What about your band mates?” she asked after a few minutes, as she continued to look at her watch.

“What about them?”

“How do you think they'll react to hearing about what happened last night?”

After everything we had gone through, the guys and I were obviously close – best friends close. They knew this wasn't something I would normally do, no matter how upset I was. How would they react? If the tables were turned and it was one of them who had tried it, I would be incredibly concerned; but I thought that maybe I'd also understand why they did it. If I were on the other side of this prison, I wouldn't know first-hand what it was like but I could only guess that it was horrible, and would make anyone want to do this.

I wasn't them, though. They cared about me, but their reaction would depend on what degree they cared about me. Would they be so understanding of my situation that it would be something they expected, or would it be so unlike me that it would worry them more?

“I don't know.”

“Clearly you do,” she said, removing her fingers from my wrist. “Your pulse just went through the roof. You're worried about it.”

“That's not fair,” I said with a smile. “You had an advantage.”

She smiled back at me, and in a soft voice, said, “I only use my powers for good, not evil. I promise.”

She went back to her job – she checked my blood pressure and my temperature, and finally ended with looking into my eyes with her light. When she asked me to look straight into her eyes, I realized how beautiful and bright they were.

I knew why all the prisoners liked her now. She was brash and sarcastic, but she was also funny and compassionate. In a place like this, where all the females were guards were authoritative and rough in both personality and appearance, she was a breath of fresh air.

“So what exactly does suicide watch mean for me?” I asked. “If I'm not going to solitary where am I going?”

“Well, this prison doesn't have a suicide prevention wing like some other prisons. We don't get that many attempted suicides here, if you can believe that. So you'll be in here with me.”

“With you?” The idea took me by surprise. My first encounter with the nurse hadn't gone as well as I had expected it to.

“Yeah. I'm actually kind of in desperate need for an assistant, to help me out around here a bit. As you can see, things are getting a bit out of control.” She pointed to her desk, piled up with papers and a huge mess of random stuff, like the coffee cup. “The warden's agreed to let me hire an assistant to help me out on a sort of work program, and they'll get compensation into their commissary account for their hours. I was going to ask Damian to help, but I have a feeling he would talk too much to get any real work done.”

I knew that no matter whether I took the job, I'd be here with her watching my every move, and the idea of having something to do with my time was tempting.

“How long?” I asked.

“Your suicide watch is three days, but I'd really love it if you stuck around at least a week. There's so much to do, I don't think one person could do it in three days.”

I was hesitant to accept; dealing with her for the next week wasn't exactly my idea of a good time.

“You'd really be helping me out,” she said, obviously sensing my hesitation. “And it might help you out – you know, give you something to do for a while.”

“I don't even know who you are,” I said, remembering that she still hadn't introduced herself.

“Abby Howell,” she said, smiling and holding out her hand. “Warren Correctional Institute's head nurse. I work far too much and love prison misfits just as much. My family thinks I might have mental problems,” she mumbled, and I smiled. “I like to read and garden in my spare time, which these days is reduced down to nothing. I was born an only child, and I'm 29 years old. My favorite color is yellow, I look awful in hats so I never wear them, and yes, this is my natural hair color.”

“That's a unique biography of yourself,” I said.

“Better than what I have for you. You're Lance Bass, former member of the popular boy band 'NSYNC. Your real name is James. You were born on May 4 in Mississippi, which you mention in almost every interview by the way, and you're a Taurus. Your mother is Diane and your father James. You love animals and your lifelong dream is go into space.”

I raised my eyebrows at her, surprised at her knowledge of me.

“Part of it I already knew. Part of it...I did my research,” she said, blushing slightly. “I know you're having a hard time trusting me right now. You're in an unfamiliar place, you're a little scared even if you won't admit it, and you don't know much about me except that I'm one of the 'prison authorities'. I have control over you, and you have none over me. I don't know a lot about you – but I do know you're in prison. I trust you, and you have to give me the same. Even though you're blind to me right now, you have to put some trust in me.”

She was right. At the same time that I felt I couldn't trust her, she couldn't trust me and she had a lot more to lose. Her job depended on distrust of the people she was around every day. If she put her trust into someone she shouldn't, she could end up hurt or worse, dead. And somehow, she was still able to give me enough trust to allow me to stay in the room uncuffed with her, and even offer me a job.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll do it. I've never done desk work before though, so I don't know if I'm exactly what you had in mind for the job.”

“Well...do you know how to file papers?”

“What do you think I am, a monkey? Of course I know how to file papers.”

She sighed, then smiled. “If you're half as good at being an assistant as you are at being an unpleasant jackass, I think you'll do just great.”

Chapter 7

My suicide watch went by faster than I had thought. Abby was right that working with her would help take my mind off things for a while. Having that eight hours a day, sometimes ten if she was busy, that I wasn't thinking about being here was eight or ten hours that I could breathe. I had someone to talk to and something to do with my hands.

Abby and I got along great after that first day. We talked about my case, and about Bailey, all at her urging. I kept the conversation about Brayden and how I had found myself here brief. Talking about it over and over, in lengthy talks, wasn't therapy even though Abby seemed to think it was. Reliving it only kept me in an endless loop, and made me want to 'make it disappear' again.

It wasn't the money I was working for; I had money, if I really wanted it, and I had people to get the money into my account if I wanted to use it. It was being around someone who actually understood me. Abby even cared about me. Damian cared, but not like Abby did. She wanted me to talk about Brayden, thinking that getting it off my chest would help pull me out of that endless loop. She wanted me to talk about it because she cared, but I couldn't yet.

It hadn't quite sunk in yet that I had tried to kill myself. Even under the most upsetting conditions, I couldn't imagine doing that to myself.

I had talked to my mom on the phone that Friday, the day my suicide watch ended. It was the first time I had been here that I had actually cried real tears. Hearing her cry for over ten minutes of our conversation had worn me down. It wasn't her disappointment in me, it was her sadness – the pain that her youngest child was in trouble and she couldn't help.

I couldn't imagine the tables being turned; me being the parent and Bailey being here when she was older, being unable to help her. I could imagine the pain and feel it, but I didn't want to.

There was too much bad stuff to think about, and not enough good. That was why I enjoyed working with Abby. While I focused on the bad when I was alone inside my cell, she focused on the good while I was with her. In the end, it all balanced out, and it made me feel like my life was balancing back out slowly.

At least the prison had issued me new clothes – I was now wearing the official prison color of white. Instead of having my inmate number stenciled on the breast of my shirt, I now had a patch of linen fabric stitched on, with 853479 above my name – Bass, Lance.

I didn't know how to feel about it. It made everything more real. If they took the time to make me an official patch with my name and everything, obviously I was going to be here a while. It was a little joyful though, because at least now I had my name back – at least I had an identity other than a measly six-digit number. At least now I wasn't just 853479, a no-name prisoner.

Having my identity back didn't change my circumstances, though. I was still in danger. I had recently discovered that Damian had kept one big piece of advice hidden from me – I had two marks against me, because I was not only new to the prison but I was also in protective custody. Not only was I “fresh meat,” I was terrified and vulnerable too, and it made me a target to the other prisoners.

Staying in protective custody was my only hope at not having any problems with the other inmates, because so far none of the other inmates in protective custody with me had given me any problems. It wasn't as if they respected me, but they didn't want to risk getting themselves in trouble either, so I would take it if I could get it.

I realized now that I had to stay in protective custody, because it might be the only place I was safe. I was lucky that my little stunt hadn't landed me in Seg to begin with – if I had been any normal inmate, they'd have put me in Seg for three days to live out my suicide watch. Because of my “celebrity” status, and because for whatever reason Abby seemed to care about me and convinced them to give me special treatment, the prison did me a favor by not sending me there. It was the first time being a celebrity had earned me anything beneficial aside from a better table at a restaurant. Needless to say, I planned to be on the straight and narrow for the rest of my stay.

Saturday was her day off, which meant it was mine by default. I needed a day off, but I wasn't looking forward to being alone. Luckily I wouldn't be alone all day. Today was visitor's day, and I knew that Joey was planning to be here today, since my mom couldn't be. JC was flying in to come along with him. I hadn't seen JC in several months, and I hadn't planned on our next visit to be like this. Since I was still a new inmate, I was only allowed non-contact visits behind a thick glass panel. I could only talk to two of my best friends through a phone, with a guard watching and listening the whole time.

The funny thing was that I was finally starting to heed Damian's advice about being grateful for what I did have instead of wishing for more. At least I was getting to talk to them, even if it was behind glass.

I never knew how much I had taken human contact for granted. After a few days of talking with Damian and getting acquainted with him, I found myself wishing I could look him in the eyes and see his expressions while he talked, instead of guessing about things like whether he was smiling or upset, whether talking about a subject made him happy or made him sad, and whether he was being sarcastic or serious about something. It was like having a conversation with someone through email instead of face-to-face, but at least I had a tell in the tone of his voice.

As transparent and open about his feelings as he was, Damian still had his secrets. He didn't talk about what he did to bring him to prison. All I knew was that he had been a drug dealer, and from what I gathered he was a very important one, and he had turned to an informant. He told me he was in protective custody because a lot of the former gang members that he had snitched on were now held in the prison in general population, and one of the benefits of his plea agreement was protection. But that's usually where he would stop talking about his criminal past, and change the subject with me.

Then there were some of the other guys in protective custody. I had gotten better the past few days and had actually ventured out into the chow hall one day for lunch, and sat with some of the other guys that Damian knew from protective custody. I was surprised to find that they were nice guys; they weren't monsters, at least not that you could see from the outside.

I didn't ask about their crimes; I knew there were probably rapists and child molesters here, especially in protective custody, but I didn't know who they were. I didn't want to know who they were. I assumed that the less knowledge I had during the next year, the better off I was. If I didn't know anything, nobody would have any recourse against me.

As I got ready for Joey and JC's visit that morning, I was finding myself in a dark, moody place again. I was looking forward to seeing my friends, but I didn't know what to expect from them. They had to have heard about the suicide attempt by now, and since Abby had brought it up, I'd been thinking about their reaction. Not only that, but seeing me in prison clothes behind a restrictive glass panel couldn't make them think the world of me.

When one of the guards came to my cell and unlocked it, it all went out of my mind pretty quickly.

Since I was only allowed non-contact visits for now, he walked me down a hallway different than the one most of the other inmates got to go through. It was a hallway full of small rooms, each with a door, but each room was separated by a glass panel with a table and chair on each side. When you looked at it with an outsider's perspective it was bleak, with all the walls being painted a dark gray and one fluorescent light for the whole room going dim. From an insider's perspective, it was the happiest place here, because it was bringing me the best thing I could look forward to this week.

When I walked up to the window and looked in, I saw them – looking at each other. Both of them looked slightly freaked out, probably feeling the way I felt a lot lately, like the bad guy of the movie would jump out and get them at any second. It made me laugh a little on the inside – neither of them had ever been inside a prison, it would be interesting to know what was going through their heads right now.

Maybe I'd even get the chance to ask them – if I got a word in edgewise.

“You've got thirty minutes,” the guard said as he unlocked the door. “I'll be watching out here. Behave yourself.”

The minute he opened the door and allowed me inside, JC and Joey's heads shot up and they caught their first glance of me. JC smiled, but Joey didn't.

I sat down and picked up the phone on my end, and JC picked up their phone and held it between the two of their ears so they could both hear the conversation.

“Hey, it's Butch Cassidy,” he said with a smile, and I couldn't help but smile a little.

“Funny, bro. Funny.”

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fantastic,” I said sarcastically.

“Yeah, I thought so. I heard you had an interesting week.”

“You heard that, huh?”

“Well, I got a couple of calls that night, so yeah. But other than that, how are you doing?”

If we hadn't been separated by glass, I'd have hugged JC for breaching the subject.

“Better...I think. I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to be doing, to be honest. The food sucks, the accommodations suck, the clothing sucks...the company isn't bad, though. My cell neighbor Damian is pretty awesome, even though he never shuts up.”

“I don't know, I kind of like your spiffy duds. You're making it work – prison chic.”

“Fuck you, JC,” I said with a laugh.

“Cut me some slack. I always thought I'd be having this conversation with Justin on the other side of the glass. You threw me for a loop here.”

“Yeah. I'm so bad-ass.”

It was a nice change to have my friends here and to be able to laugh, but the look on Joey's face was unmistakable. There was something different about me, and I knew he noticed. It had him concerned.

“Justin and Chris are sorry they couldn't make it out to see you,” JC said. “Both of them had already made commitments.”

“Yeah, I know how it is,” I responded.

“You look good, man.”

“I look like hell, Jace,” I said. “You don't have to sugarcoat anything. I know I look awful.”

“I can't lie,” he said. “You really do look like hell. You look like you haven't slept in a month.”

“Pretty damn close. I did get some sleep a few days ago – did you know that Oxycontin is good stuff?”

This time, neither of them laughed, chuckled or even smirked.

“Why'd you do it, Lance?” Joey asked. He must have been so relieved to finally get it off his chest.

“I'm so sick of hearing that question this week,” I said with a slight chuckle.

“Well, get over it,” he said. “You're my best friend. When my best friend tries to kill himself, I'm going to ask questions and I want to get answers.”

Joey and JC were the only two people that I felt I could give the real answer to.

“I don't know, Joey. I don't want to be here, I don't belong here and I shouldn't be here. I don't know how I ended up here. I feel like I'm in a bad fucking dream. This place is hell and I've only been here a week. I've got at least year to go.”

“You tried to hurt yourself,” he said.

“I've been beating myself up on the inside all week. I figured I'd give my mind a break and focus on the body for a while.”

I could tell my cryptic answer didn't satisfy him.

“We're worried about you,” JC said. “We never imagined we'd be visiting you in a prison. The way you look – it's scary, man. You just don't look like yourself.”

“What you're doing to yourself is even scarier,” Joey said.

“Guys, I'm fine,” I said with a sigh. “This is supposed to be my reprieve from all the shit I've been dealing with all week. This is my one moment of happy in this place this week. Can we actually visit instead of reliving my personal hell?”

After that, they stopped. They still gave me disapproving looks for my bad taste in jokes, but I could see their side. They didn't know what I was going through. They didn't know that joking about it was my only way of dealing with it.

They tried to talk about “light” stuff during the rest of the visit, or at least what they thought was light. JC talked about being in the studio and the new season of his show coming up; Joey talked about his girls, how Brianna was doing in school and Kloey's new developments.

It didn't take long before Joey ran out of happy stuff to talk about and had no choice but to talk about my lawyer's struggle to work on my case.

“He hasn't even started working on trying to get you out. He's been too busy jumping through legal loopholes trying to find a way to force Brayden to give up custody of Bailey. He knows it won't be easy, he thinks she's going to fight all the way. Not to mention he's been working on a couple other cases at the same time. He's swamped, but he's trying.”

“You know Bray hasn't even visited me?” I asked.

“Don't count on it happening either,” he said. “She's been too busy partying. She left Bailey with me Wednesday night, even though I don't know why. She looked at me like she thought I was going to take her and run out of town or something.”

“How's Bailey dealing with all of this?” That was the question I didn't want to know the answer to, because I knew it couldn't be good.

“She's confused,” Joey said simply.

“Hasn't Bray explained anything to her?”

“Lance, you need to take off the rose-colored glasses,” Joey said. “Of course Bray hasn't explained anything to her. And as much as I hate her, I also can't place all the blame on her. The thought of explaining prison to a four-year-old is mind-boggling and exhausting.”

“How the fuck do you explain the concept of prison to a four-year-old?” JC asked, to no one in particular.

“It's impossible,” I said. “It's impossible to explain to my daughter where I am and why I'm not around without royally screwing her up. I'm not sure I could even do it if I wasn't here. And yet here I am, expecting my best friend to do it for me.”

“Hey,” Joey said. “I told you – whatever it takes. But it's going to take a lot longer than either of us wants it to. I'm working on it when I'm home, and when I'm gone working, Kelly and Rich are working on it together.”

“I still can't thank you enough, Joe.”

“What the hell are friends for if they're no good when you're in a bind?”

“Or in prison,” I said with a smile.

Finally, I got the two of them to crack a smile.

“You know, this reminds me of one of those viral Facebook things,” JC said. “You know, 'if you woke up in jail and saw your best friend next to you, what is the first three words you'd say' or something like that.”

“Yeah, but most people say three words that are funny,” Joey responded. “They've never really been in that situation.”

“But still. My answer is completely different for each of you – like Lance, if I was in here with you, I'd probably say 'What the hell?' But if I woke up next to Justin, I'd say 'What'd you do?'”

I laughed, because that would probably be my reaction too.

“If I was next to you JC, I'd probably say 'What the hell?'” Joey said. “If I was next to Lance, I'd probably say 'That was awesome.' Because if Lance and I were to end up in jail together, you know it'd have to be for something awesome.”

“What about Chris?” I asked.

“Probably 'I told you so,'” JC said with a laugh.

“That's four words.”

“Four words that fit.”

We laughed for a while longer over it, before I realized I hadn't told them about Abby.

“I forgot to tell you guys – I got a job. Well, sort of.”

“A job?” JC asked.

“Kind of. Temporary, at least. Doing office work for the nurse here.”

“Why the hell would you need a job?” Joey said.

“It's not about the money, Joe. It's something to do to avoid going crazy. And she's a good listener.”

“She?” JC asked with a smile.

“Yeah, she. What are you saying, Jace?”

“He's saying be careful, Lance,” Joey said, interrupting before JC could say what he really wanted to.

Before I could respond, the guard knocked on the door and came in. My visiting time was over.

“Damn it,” I said.

“I'll be back again in a month,” Joey said to me. “Hopefully by then we'll have some of this all figured out.”

“I'm flying back to LA tomorrow and my schedule is full for the next few months. I'll keep in touch with Joey and hopefully we can figure out something by phone. I want to try to help, too,” JC said.

“Thanks guys.”

“We're still brothers – band or no band,” Joey said.

“The best brothers in the world,” I responded.

“Don't pull any more stupid shit, Lance. Let us help you.”

I sighed. “Okay, Joey.”

“I promise I'll bring you something good next month – I don't know what, but I will. Hang in until next month.”

“I will. I have to go.”

Goodbyes had never been so awkward between me and the guys. I was glad I'd been able to visit them, but this wasn't the most glamorous circumstances.

Most of the rest of the night, I relaxed in my cell and used the time to unwind from my visit with them. I contemplated Brayden, Bailey, my struggling court case, and most of all, what the two of them could have possibly meant by 'be careful.'

I was reading a book later that night when I got a surprise.

“Hey you.”

I looked up from my book to see Officer Daniels standing at my cell door.

“Let's go. You have a visitor.”

“I already had my visitors today, I'm not expecting anybody else.”

“Well,” she said as she unlocked the door, “I don't know who it is, but I know you have one. So let's go.”

As she walked me down the hallway, I tried to think of who would be here to visit me. Joey and JC had left hours ago, and I knew Justin and Chris weren't able to get away to visit me. My mom and dad couldn't make the trip from Mississippi all the way to New York this time either.

“You honestly don't know who's here?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said. “I was just told you had a visitor. I'm only the messenger and the escort. You looking a visiting horse in the mouth?”

“A visitor is a visitor, I guess,” I said with a smile as she opened the door to the visitors' area.

Visiting hours didn't end for another hour, but most of the visitors that had showed up today had already left, so the visiting area was nearly empty. The non-contact area was even emptier than the general area, so it looked like I would be the only one here.

Unfortunately, when she opened the door to the room and I saw exactly who was sitting behind the glass, a visitor was not something I wanted right now. Of all the people I had imagined would pop in to visit me today, Brayden was the last person I expected.

Chapter 8

She was sitting in the hard plastic chair, looking content and calm – definitely unlike the Brayden that I had come to know over the past few years. She had a motivation for being here – that I was absolutely certain of. She wasn't stupid enough to come here for the pure pleasure of being here, and she wasn't here for my sake. She was so unpredictable that I couldn't tell why she was here.

Seeing her now, with the knowledge of what she had been doing probably all those years, the behavior made sense now. When she was under the influence of drugs, she was crazy and uncontrollable, even violent. When she wasn't under the influence, she was like the old Bray, the Bray that I had met.

She looked like the old Bray right now. She had her blonde hair pulled back in a clip, her face made up lightly. She was dressed up like she was ready to go out, in her normal sequined top, dark washed jeans, and black leather open-toed heels. She didn't look like the Bray I had left – but she was full of surprises.

Whatever her motivation was, it wasn't the reason I wanted her to visit me. It wasn't because she cared about me.

“You behave yourself,” Officer Daniels mumbled in my ear as I prepared to sit down in the chair. “She looks like she brings trouble, and I don't like trouble.”

Apparently, it was pretty obvious to her that this wasn't a visitor I had planned on seeing. She exited the room and stood outside watching us through the window, just like the officer had when Joey and JC had visited.

Brayden didn't pick up the phone to talk to me right away. Instead, she sat there for a couple of minutes, staring at me uncomfortably. Occasionally she would divert her eyes away from mine, like she had something to say but it had to be carefully thought over first.

I watched her the whole time though, not bothering to look away. I had so many things to say to her. I'd had all the time in the world to think of what I would say to her if I saw her again, and now that I had the chance, I didn't feel like half the stuff I'd thought of was anything I could say to her.

Finally, she picked up the phone carefully, so I did the same.

“You're probably wondering why I'm here,” she said cautiously.

“I know exactly why you're here,” I lied. “You're here because you lit the match, you started the fire, and now you can't help but return to the scene to watch me burn.”

“I'm here because I thought maybe you would like a visitor,” she said. “If you want me to go, I can walk out the door.”

“Who do you think you're kidding? You're not here for me, Bray. But I can't figure out if you came here to throw it in my face that you were cheating on me, that now you have Bailey and I'll never see her again, or whether it's something else.”

“I'm here because I thought we needed to talk,” she said.

“I don't think we do. I think you said all you needed to say by letting me end up here. I have nothing to say.”

“Then maybe I came here because I needed to talk.”

“Then talk,” I said.

She paused for several seconds. She was breathing as if she was trying to gather up the courage to say what she needed to say, or as if she was about to cry. I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with her; Brayden didn't cry, ever. I don't remember her even crying when our daughter was born, despite the pain and emotion. I didn't think she was capable of tears.

“I'm sorry,” she finally said. “I didn't mean for any of this to happen.”

“Then make it right.”

“What can I do to make it right? Confess? Do you really think that if I confess, they'll drop all the charges against you? Do you think they'll let you walk right out of here and say 'We're sorry for the inconvenience'?”

They wouldn't, and even I wasn't stupid enough to believe that.

“Bailey will be no better off with two parents in jail.”

“That's a sick fucking excuse, Brayden,” I said.

“Be that as it may, you know I'm right, Lance.”

It was a sick excuse, but she was right. I wasn't here because I was a drug addict, but I was here because I was caught with them. Even if she sacrificed herself for me, no good could come from it. Bailey would have two parents in jail then. I couldn't blame Brayden for not giving herself up, because for once she was thinking of her daughter.

Suddenly, my emotions switched from mad to hurt.

“It took you a whole fucking week to come visit me,” I said.

“With the attitude that you have now, can you understand why? You're pissed at me. And I know why you're pissed at me, but...who wants to visit someone who has a grudge against them?”

“Why are you here anyway? You know I'm pissed at you, and you have Jason now. What reason do you have to come visit me?”

“I'm here to give you exactly what you want. I'm signing over my parental rights to Joey.”

At first I nearly dropped the phone; I wasn't sure I'd heard her right.

“You're doing what?” I asked.

“I'm signing over my parental rights to Joey and Kelly,” she said. “I can't do this, Lance. I'm not cut out to be a mom. I'm not sure that I ever was. You and Bailey have a connection that I don't seem to have with her. She loves you so much, and you love her – I don't think you've ever loved me like that. It's something that I can't compete with, and I shouldn't have to compete against my own daughter for your love. When your lawyer dropped the papers by and talked to me about signing over my parental rights, I knew he was right that it was the best thing to do for both you and Bailey.”

I'd realized over the past few days that maybe I had been so insistent that Bailey be taken away because I wanted to get back at Brayden. In my heart, I knew that Brayden was wrong. She had been a good mom once, and even though she had made a lot of mistakes lately, she was showing that somewhere she still had Bailey's best interests at heart.

Still, I was wary of her true intentions.

“How do I know this isn't one of your little games?” I asked.

“I haven't been the best person the past few years. I know that. I want you to trust me again, but I know you can't do that. I'm asking for you to trust me this one last time. Blind faith.”

I remembered what Abby had said a few days ago, about not knowing but trusting blindly. Even though I wasn't with Brayden anymore, I couldn't act like a child and cut off all ties with her. I had to think about the sake of Bailey; she needed both a dad and a mom. We had to learn to get along for the sake of our child, especially now.

“I can't trust you,” I said. I watched her expression fall. “But I will put my blind faith into trusting you this one time. For the sake of Bailey, if nothing else.”

“I am sorry, you know,” she said.

“You have yet to prove that.”

This new side of Brayden that I was seeing was a little hard to believe, even with blind faith. It was going to be hard.

“I'm trying, Lance. I'm apologizing, and I'm being honest. I'm giving you what you really want – Bailey.”

“I want that. But that's not what I really want, Bray,” I said quietly.

“What do you want then, Lance?”

What I wanted was different from what I knew I needed, but I had to admit it.

“I want to give it another try,” I said. “I want to work out our problems and make it work for us, and for Bailey. She needs both of us right now. I miss you, Bray.”

“Jason and I are getting married.”

That time, I did drop the phone. I barely got my senses back in time to grip it before it dropped onto the table in front of me.

“We're running off to Vegas. I moved on a long time ago, Lance. I didn't have the common sense to end it the right way. After Vegas we're going to California. From there, I don't know. I just know I'm not coming back to New York for a long time.”

It was all I could do to keep from smashing the glass between us – or possibly breaking down. My emotions had been so crazy; everybody kept playing around with them like they were a jack-in-the-box: up and down, all the time. I didn't know what bothered me more – the fact that I finally realized I had lost her, or the fact that I'd lost her to her fake male model boyfriend.

“I was such a damn fool.”

“Lance--”

“I don't know how I couldn't see any of this,” I said. “I gave you everything you ever wanted. I gave you a place to live when you had nowhere to go. I got your modeling career back. I thought I had given you a great life.”

“You tried,” she said. “The problem is that I couldn't ever give you what you wanted in return.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I was never good enough,” she said with a slight scoff. “It was always about the image to you. You wanted me to be this great mother, like Kelly and your own mother. You didn't want to marry me until I was perfect. Aren't I right, Lance?”

Her face had changed – I saw a tinge of that new Bray coming through.

“See, with Jason, there's no expectations,” she said.

“Yeah, no shit,” I said with a snide laugh. “As long as you stay high as a kite, you're perfect for him.”

She pursed her lips.

“I have somewhere to be.”

“I'm sure you do, wedding planning and all,” I said. “I hope you'll be so happy together. Sorry I can't be there to make a more personal toast.”

“I'm taking the car,” she said. “Everything else is yours, but you owe me. Your lawyer knows where to find all your important papers if he needs them, and I'm dropping the keys to the house and the other car with Joey. Jason has all of Bailey's stuff packed up--”

“He'd better not lay one finger on my daughter,” I said.

She stopped and didn't say a word. For a minute during her visit, I thought things would go great and be civil, and now I realized that from now on, nothing could be civil between us again.

“Did you ever love me?” I asked.

“Who says I ever stopped?” she responded.

Despite the fact that she had all but outright said she still loved me, the mood in the room stayed tense. I knew no matter how she felt about me, she wasn't staying.

“I'll be out of your life. All I came here for was to apologize, tell you about Bailey, and say goodbye. I'm leaving tonight after I drop her off at Joey's. We're driving all the way to Vegas. I'll be all the way across the country. I can't fuck up your life much more than I have now. You won't miss me for long.”

She lowered her head for a moment, and when she lifted it back up I saw tears in her eyes, despite the nasty attitude she had radiated moments earlier. I guess she was capable of them.

“I have to go,” she said, looking away from me, fighting the tears. “I have a long drive ahead of me. I am sorry, Lance.”

She snatched a purse up off the floor and stood up quickly. She pushed her chair back towards the table and it made a horrible nails-on-chalkboard sound against the linoleum floor, and she rushed out the door as quickly and unexpectedly as she had come.

Watching her walk out that door hurt like hell. It would have been less painful to get stabbed by one of the other inmates. It felt a little like that, actually. I did something I didn't normally do – I got so pissed that I punched the glass that had been separating us.

“Alright, you got it off your chest,” Officer Daniels said, grabbing one of my arms. I hadn't even heard her come back through the door. “You need to calm yourself down, you hear? I don't want to have to cuff you.”

She watched me take a few breaths to calm myself down, and I went back and forth looking in her eyes and watching the door Brayden had walked out of.

“You good now?”

“I'm good now,” I said.

The hardest part wasn't convincing her, it was convincing myself.

Chapter 9

Sunday, bright and early at eight in the morning, it was time for me to return to “work.” The same officer that had escorted me to my visit with Joey and JC walked with me to the infirmary – but to the surprise of both of us, Abby wasn't there yet.

“I guess I'll have to take you back to your cell until she gets here,” he said.

“I can get started on my work without her,” I said cautiously. “With you here, of course. I have a lot of stuff to finish for her.”

“Well,” he hesitated for a moment, “I guess that would work. Abby's rarely late, I can't imagine she will take long. Go ahead and get started on your work.”

The truth was, I didn't have so much work that it couldn't wait. I just needed time out of my cell. Ever since the visit with Brayden the night before, it felt like the three concrete walls and the metal bars were closing in on me.

About twenty minutes later, Abby burst through her door, almost hitting the guard standing there watching over me, her arms full of papers.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, incredibly flustered. “I had some stuff to deal with this morning, and it ran late and...”

I turned around in my seat to look at her as she dropped a full folder of papers out of her arms and onto the ground. The guard immediately bent down to help her pick them up.

“My morning is not going very well. Thank you, John. I need to get my act together, I guess.”

“You doing okay, Abby?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she responded. “I had to drop off those papers at the office this morning that I told you about.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “How'd it go?”

She looked up at me as they gathered the last paper off the floor.

“Thanks for helping John, and thanks for watching him until I got here. I really appreciate it. You should probably get back to your hall now.”

“Okay,” he said hesitantly, briefly looking over at me. “If you have any trouble out of him, or need to talk about it over lunch, call over to the hall.”

“He's no trouble,” she said with a smile, then she looked over at me again. “I'll...call you later, after your shift. Okay?”

After he left, I turned back to my work, ignoring the way she had dismissed him in front of me.

“You know, I'm starting to take it personally that everybody keeps saying 'if you have any trouble out of him.' Do I look like a troublemaker or something?”

“No,” she said, and laughed. “John is a little green to his job. He's only been here about two years. It doesn't help that in his first two months here, they assigned him to Ad Seg and he got stabbed in the shoulder by one of the inmates.”

“Oh my God, really?”

“Yeah. Guy put him in the hospital for a month. He stabbed him because he was off his schizophrenia meds and the voices told him John was going to steal his food. Or his TV. Or something.” She chuckled. “I don't remember. Anyway, he's Riker's mental health unit's problem now.”

She grabbed a coffee cup out of one of her cabinets, then looked at me.

“You want some?” she asked, holding up her cup.

“Are you supposed to let me?”

“I probably shouldn't. But John's gone, and I doubt that me giving you coffee will get me fired. I'm not that worried about it.”

“I'd love some. But don't get yourself fired.” I smiled. “Rule breaker.”

“I prefer the term 'rebel',” she said as she poured two cups. “I probably shouldn't have told you what I did about John, though. We're not supposed to give out personal information to the inmates.”

“Why?”

“Because then they know our weaknesses.” She sat one of the cups down in front of me, and took a drink out of hers. “Wives, girlfriends, kids, family, old injuries...inmates can take any bit of information and find a way to use it against us for their own benefit.”

“I don't think I could learn to deal with that. But just so you know, I'd never do that to anybody here.”

“Why should I believe you?” she said. “Aren't you still technically a criminal?”

That was the first time in the week that I'd known her that she'd called me a criminal. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, and even though it stung my ego a little, I realized that she was right.

“I guess, technically, I am. Maybe you can't believe me – but you said yourself that I'm not a troublemaker.”

“You're right, I did.”

“I guess it's kind of like you said the day we met – you have to trust me, even though you're blind to me.”

She looked in my eyes and a smirk came across her face – probably a twisted satisfaction of knowing that I actually listened to her that day, and took something away from our conversation.

“Speaking of trouble,” she said, “I heard you had a visitor yesterday.”

I looked away quickly. “I plead the fifth.”

“Your trial is over, criminal,” she said with that same smirk across her lips. “You can't plead the fifth.”

“You know too much,” I said, laughing at her.

“Guards and staff gossip – sometimes even with the inmates. So, who was she? Was she one of your old band groupies?” She said it in a suggestive manner, leaning against the desk next to me with one hand on her hip, like a teenage girl gossiping at her locker.

“No,” I said. “Not even close.”

“Well she wasn't your sister, and she sure as hell wasn't your mom. So who was she?”

I stopped smiling; I didn't want to talk about it, but she wasn't going to let this one go.

“That was my ex-girlfriend, Brayden,” I said with a sigh.

“Oh.” The smirk disappeared from her face and she shifted her stance uncomfortably. “Well, I guess I know why it was such a big deal around the staff break room, then. So how did that go?”

“I wish I could say it went well, but I can't.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There's not that much to talk about.”

“Sure there is,” she said. “There's always something to talk about when the ex-girlfriend shows up to visit.”

“Let me rephrase that – there's not much that I want to talk about.”

She looked at me and took another drink of her coffee.

“Bottling it up inside won't help, you know,” she said.

“I'm not bottling it up,” I scoffed. “I just don't want to talk about it.”

“Whatever,” she said with an eyeroll. “That's like, the definition of bottling it up.”

“You are so damn persistent and stubborn.”

“I prefer tenacious.”

She smiled at me, but I didn't smile back.

“Come on,” she said, lowering her voice. “Talk to me about it. You might feel better if you talk about it to someone who listens and actually cares.”

I had relived the whole visit with Brayden all night long. I hadn't gotten any sleep, because it was all I could think about – what I had done wrong, how I had pushed her away in the first place, and why she would want to be with a guy like Jason when I had tried to give her everything I ever could. I couldn't come up with anything.

“She came by to tell me that she's getting married,” I said. I took a drink of coffee, feeling her eyes on me. “She's running off with the guy that she was cheating on me with and they're getting married.” I half-scoffed, half-chuckled in disgust. “In Vegas.”

“Ouch,” she said in a low voice. “That's a marriage just destined to last.”

“Why do you women do it? Why do you cheat?”

She had been pulling some medical supplies out of her cabinet to start her day, but she stopped what she was doing and looked at me again.

“First of all, I don't cheat,” she said. “Second, why do you men cheat?”

“I didn't mean to offend you.”

“Oh, you didn't offend me. I don't have a guilty conscience.” She went back to organizing her supplies. “But you made a general statement towards women. Why does anybody cheat? Why does one woman cheat on a man, when his next girlfriend doesn't? Women cheat, like men cheat. But not all women cheat, like not all men cheat.”

I had to chuckle. “You've thought this out.”

“I'm fascinated by the science of the mind and psyche. I started getting interested in it shortly after I started working here. Why do some men commit heinous murders without breaking a sweat about it, while others do it once and feel guilty about it and never get over it for the rest of their lives? How can one man rape a girl who isn't even past puberty while another wouldn't even dream of touching a girl that young? Our fantasies, relationships with other people, sex...” I noticed her blushing a little. “It's all controlled by something in our heads, and we can't see it or understand it, let alone control it.”

“You sound like you're justifying Bray's actions – not only that, but it sounds like you're justifying the actions of some of the other people here.”

“It does raise the question of who's responsible for their own actions and who's not, and how that responsibility is determined.” She smiled. “But I'm not justifying anything for anybody. It's not my responsibility. I'm not one of them, and I don't have any of their sins to atone for. As for Bray – I can't justify anything for her, because I'm not her. I can only give you my pseudo-diagnosis.”

“And your 'pseudo-diagnosis', doctor?”

She stopped again to look at me, looking serious.

“She must be crazy to cheat on a guy like you.”

I didn't know whether she was trying for flirtation, flattery, seriousness, or something all together different. Her face was so difficult to read.

“Daniels told me that you nearly broke the glass in the room when this girl left. Is that because she's getting married, or is it for another reason?”

“I'm pissed off that she's getting married, yes.” I went back to my work, putting a couple of papers that Abby needed to look over in a separate pile on the desk. “I'm hurt, more than anything. But is that the only reason I'm pissed off? Probably not.”

“Why are you so mad? Especially since she's the reason you're here. I would think that if she screwed you over enough to land you here, you'd be more than willing to pass her off onto another guy.”

“I fell in love with her, had a daughter with her, and committed myself and my life to her. For some reason, I thought half the job description of a girlfriend was screwing you over in some way.”

“You're not bitter,” she said with a laugh.

“Maybe I am,” I agreed. “But I've never met anyone like Bray. She was a different person when I met her. I miss the Bray that fell in love with, and she's in there somewhere still. I just don't know where.”

“She didn't just cheat on you, did she?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it isn't the cheating that bothers you. Men get over cheating, usually pretty quickly I might add. Most of you don't waste your time and energy on a failed relationship like us women do.”

“It's not like I'm not sitting on a couch stuffing my face full of ice cream and watching movies in my sweatpants all day.”

“No, you're not. Instead you're sitting on your bed in your jumpsuit stuffing your face full of prescription pills.”

I smiled; of course she'd pull that out. “Touché. There's no winning with you, is there?”

“Usually not. I'm tenacious, remember?”

I chuckled and rolled my eyes, and both of us went back to our work.

“I'm curious,” she said after a few minutes. “If your ex-girlfriend is running off with another guy to Vegas, chances are she's not coming back to New York. What's happening with your daughter? Is she going to take her away from you?”

“That's the weirdest thing – she's signing over her parental rights to my friend Joey, and leaving her with him and his wife.”

“Out of the blue like that?”

“Yep,” I said. “My lawyer asked her to sign the papers and she did it. I still can't figure out whether she had some kind of weird epiphany, or if she has her own motives and it's all about selfishness like normal.”

“Sounds pretty selfish to me. Who gives up their parental rights when a lawyer asks them to? I'd fight like hell.”

“Normally, so would Bray,” I responded. “Which is exactly why I can't figure it out.”

“What is there to figure out?” she asked. “She's a drug addict. It's not too easy to party with a child under your feet.”

“You don't know Bray. We fought for an hour one morning over what to have for breakfast. You're pig-headed and stubborn, but you have nothing on Brayden. No matter how ridiculous or small it seems to anyone else, Bray never admits defeat. I don't think she knows the meaning. To her, the ultimate selfish act would be taking Bailey away from me and never letting me see her again – it would even trump not having to take care of a child and being able to party and do drugs whenever she wanted to.”

“How long has she been doing drugs?”

“That's a question I think only Bray and God know the answer to. All I know is that she started changing a couple of years ago; staying out late, meeting new friends, partying until all hours of the morning, and coming home with enough alcohol in her system to get a frat house drunk. She would come home completely unreasonable and unpredictable. Some nights she would want to fight, sometimes she would start a fight for the hell of it. Other nights she would come home and push me down on the bed without any warning, but she was violent. Disturbingly insatiable, actually.”

“You're painting such a pretty picture of her,” she said sarcastically.

“Like I said, she was different when I met her. But the Bray I saw yesterday was different, too. That wasn't her, at least not the one that I left at that house a week ago. I don't understand it.”

“Drugs make people do weird things,” she said. “They make you...different. Like you know a person one minute and the next they're under the influence and they're a completely new person. The good twin and the evil twin.”

“I just wish I could tell which one was which,” I said.

“Maybe she's in pain, like you, and it's hiding deep down inside there somewhere. Maybe she's using the drugs to cover it up.”

“Could be. Could also be that she's a psychotic bitch.”

She looked at me with shock in her eyes. “Well,” she said with a smile, “at least you can forgive and forget.”

“Sorry. I guess I'm a little jaded. I can't understand how you can work here and not be.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's so much bad shit in this world; people abandoning their kids, guns in schools, starving and homeless people, raping and killing. I don't remember it being this bad when I was a kid.”

“Well, I don't either. But as a parent you should know that parents try to shield their kids from that stuff. They read us fairy tales at night, not the local newspaper. We probably wouldn't remember it.”

“True. But you work in a prison. You see new guys come in here every week. Some of the new ones' crimes are worse than the older ones I'll bet. How do you manage to stay as happy as you always seem to be? I'd be hopeless and miserable by now, thinking that the whole world is lost.”

“I don't like to think that the world is lost. I really prefer to think that some people are lost, and a few of them have a harder time finding their way than others. It helps me sleep at night.”

For some reason, I could understand that philosophy.

“You know,” she said, getting back to pulling out medical supplies. “If I didn't know any better, I'd say we had a whole conversation with each other and actually got along.”

“Weird, isn't it? Knowing the two of us, you probably shouldn't get used to it,” I said.

She laughed. “I've been thinking.”

“That can't be good.”

“Shut up,” she said with a chuckle. “I've been thinking that you've been really helpful to me. You've been working wonders for my paperwork, you've been amazing with some of the inmates, and look at my desk.”

Her desk had improved – I had managed to organize all her office supplies and clear off the growing pile of paperwork, neatly filing it away for her. You could actually see the wood grain now.

“Please stay with me,” she said. “I know you were on the fence about it before, but you're improving things for both of us. And I think you need something to do with your time now more than you did before.”

“Unfortunately, I think you're right,” I said with a sigh.

“Will you stay then? Will you be my full-time assistant?”

After a pause to think it over, I said, “I think I will.”

Chapter 10

Maybe it was a testament to how much of an attitude change I'd had in that time, but before I knew it two whole months had passed by.

I didn't even know it had been that long until Damian told me that morning during breakfast. Maybe instead it was a testament to how busy Abby had kept me. This had been my first chance to get out for some exercise in a few weeks. It was a cold day in December, and most of the inmates didn't want any part of the cold weather today. Damian and I wanted the fresh air though, so we were braving the cold by playing a little basketball.

About a month ago, at his last visit, Joey had come bearing the news that Brayden had gone through with marrying Jason. Abby had expressed doubts that it would happen a few times, but I'd never had any doubts. She had kept in contact with Joey to check up on Bailey, but after six weeks her phone calls came less frequently. The last either of us heard, she was in Ione, California, but Damian had a friend in Los Angeles that thought she was hanging out with a few of his old drug friends.

Bailey was having a hard time adjusting to everything. Joey said she rarely asked about her mother and why she was missing, but asked him about me all the time. He tried to convince me that she was doing well for the circumstances, but I knew he was trying to make me feel better.

I was having a hard time adjusting to the idea that nothing would ever be normal for me again – at least not the same as it was before.

“You can't blame yourself, man,” Damian said. “You didn't abandon your daughter. You didn't up and leave her.”

“I might as well have,” I said. “First her mom disappears on her and now me.”

“She's having a hard time now. But in a couple of years, this will be a distant memory for her. You'll get back to her soon and everything will go back to normal. It'll be like this never happened.”

“Normal for us was waiting up for Bray until the crack of dawn, fielding 'Where's mommy?' every night for the past two years, D. Now she's gone somewhere in the deep depths of California, killing off brain cells, forgetting she even has a daughter.”

“See, you're dysfunctional, because you don't see that you and your baby are better off now,” he said. “You see that as a bad thing.”

“Yeah, D, I guess I do,” I said. I haphazardly threw the ball at the hoop, missing by at least three inches. “I love her and want her to come home to me and our daughter. It's probably horrible, but I can't help it.”

“Move on, man. You're so much better than she is. Trust me.”

He was repeating what Joey had said, only in different words. I knew deep down they were right, but I couldn't snap my fingers and make all the pain of losing her go away.

“It's not like a light switch,” I said. “I can't just pull a trigger and pretend that the last five years didn't happen. And that it doesn't hurt like hell.”

“Hell, I know that. But you can't sit here for the next year and pretend it's still happening either. And from my perspective, that's exactly what you're doing.”

“What I'm doing is sitting in prison,” I said. “For drug charges. I don't even do drugs. I tried marijuana once and didn't even like that. And now I'm stuck here, not quite knowing how this even happened, wondering when the hell it's going to end.”

“You don't think that maybe Brayden had you feeling like you've been in prison for the last five years anyway? And maybe it bothers you that now she's gone and still has you imprisoned so you can't move on?”

I didn't respond, only watched him throw his own shot and locked eyes with him a moment when he looked up.

“I'm just sayin',” he said. “Seems to me like you're doing better here than you did with her for five years.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, “if I am, it's probably because of Abby. She keeps me busy.”

A smile formed on his face. “Oh, she sure does.”

“I think she just doesn't want me to have time to think about all this stuff. She knows it bothers me.”

“Yep, she knows that.”

“She doesn't like to see me upset, so she tries to get me to smile whenever she can.”

He laughed as he bent down to pick up the basketball.

“Are you going to tell me what the hell is so funny to you?” I asked.

“Only the fact that either you're denying it, or you can't see what's right in front of your face,” he said with a smile.

“See what?”

“You and Abby.”

“What about me and Abby?”

He clutched the basketball in his arm.

“Abby, Abby, Abby. Every fifth word out of your mouth lately seems to be her name. When she walks down the hall, she can't resist stopping by your cell to say hi. You haven't had a pair of handcuffs on since the week after you got here 'cause she's got all the guards sweet-talked into loving you, too. And the way you guys look at each other...”

“How do we look at each other?” I asked.

“Like your universes revolve completely around each other.”

I laughed. “No, Damian...no.”

“You can deny it all you want, but I saw it.”

“When did you supposedly see this?” I asked, still amused.

“You remember last week when I got my ass handed to me by that new guy on our hall?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the healing cut still over his eyebrow. “You came in bleeding and Abby asked you if Roberta had finally got sick of your mouth constantly running and kicked your ass. And I laughed because I wondered the same thing.”

“Yeah, not quite what happened. Anyway, Abby was stitching me up, asked you to grab her something, and when you handed it to her and the two of you looked at each other, you both had that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“That look like you're so stupid in love that you can't even form coherent words. I'm surprised either of you remembered I was there to begin with.”

“So, you're convinced that we're in love because you saw us look at each other?”

“Don't you even begin to act like it's so ridiculous,” he said. “I'm sure you looked the same way at Brayden five years ago.”

“Yeah, and look where that got me.”

I snatched the basketball out of his hands and threw it at the basket, missing the shot again.

“You gotta let it go, man,” he said.

“I don't think I know how.”

“Oh, you know how. You just don't want to because it's all you've known. It's too comfortable for you. Moving on to something completely new is scary. You gotta let that go and move on to something exciting, something your heart wants.”

“My heart wants to be home.”

“Your heart wants Abby to be right there beside you.”

I chuckled. “Are you still on that? I thought we had moved past that one.”

“You need to admit it to yourself. I am your voice of reason in that muddled brain of yours, telling you exactly what I know you want.”

“I appreciate the gesture, but I didn't designate you as my voice of reason. Besides, what makes you an expert in love? You talk all the time about Brayden, but I haven't heard you say one word about your girlfriend since I got here.”

“That's 'cause there ain't much to say about that,” he said somberly.

“And yet, you can go on and on about me and Abby when there's not even anything going on between us.”

The smile disappeared from Damian's face and his mood changed entirely. He took several shots at the basket without saying anything.

“Wow,” I said. “That's the first time I've left you speechless in three months. Seems to me there's more to talk about than you let on.”

“Not really,” he said, without looking me in the eyes. “Not a lot to talk about since she died five and a half years ago.”

I was floored for a moment, while he went on taking shots.

“Sounds like that's something to talk about,” I said.

“I don't talk about it,” he responded.

“Maybe you should start with me.”

I didn't want to push him to talk about it, but it felt like he wanted to tell me something, even if he guarded some of the details.

He went for a free throw and for the first time the whole game, missed the shot. Instead of walking after the ball as it rolled away, he stopped and looked at me.

“One of my friends was a pretty big dealer in Brooklyn. When I first moved here, I was one of the guys that helped him get his business off the ground – bringing in customers, moving product and stuff like that. After a couple of years, he was doing so well in the cocaine business that he decided he wanted to move to meth production.”

He looked away from me for a moment and stuffed his hands in the pocket of his hoodie.

“I was comfortable with cocaine, but meth wasn't anything that I wanted a part of. He wanted me to go in on it with him like I had before, but I didn't want to. So instead I decided to branch off on my own. Most of his people didn't want any part of it either, so they decided to come along with me. Then his customers decided to follow me, too. I cost him a lot of business, a lot of money. Of course, he didn't like that. I didn't have any beef with him, but he did with me – so he had a bullet with my name on it. Only he made a mistake and ended up getting her instead.”

I was at a loss of the right thing to say, so I said nothing.

“They never could pin him down for it. I got her mixed in with the wrong crowd. I was stupid and reckless. Thought I was invincible – never did occur to me that she wasn't.”

The ball had hit the fence and rolled back to us, so he picked it up rolled it around in his hands.

“A few months later, I got myself in some big-time trouble. DA offered me a deal of twenty-five years in PC if I'd give up some of my people – when you're staring at life, parole after ten years sounds pretty good. I had a beef now, so he was one of the first I gave up. He knows I turned on him, so now he's out for me again and he's got his people out on me, too. Some days, I wish I'd taken life instead. I'm not living much better protected than I would if I were serving life.”

He looked at the ball for a moment, then threw it back at the hoop.

“Then there's some days I wish his bullet would have found its proper target.”

“You don't wish that,” I said.

“I don't usually open up to people like that. I loved her – thought I would build up a little money, then I could leave the drug mess entirely and get married and start a family, like my mama wanted me to. I guess God had different plans for both of us.”

“I'm sorry, Damian.”

“I'm not an expert in love,” he said. “But I damn sure do know that I miss my girl, and if I could do anything to get her back, I would. And I do know that by not letting yourself move on, you're denying yourself something wonderful – something I would sacrifice anything to get back myself.”

“Abby and I,” I said, “we're friends. Maybe I love her as a friend, because she's made being here a lot less lonely – but it's nothing more than that.”

He looked at me for a moment before picking the ball back off the ground.

“You know what?” he said, throwing the ball at my chest. “Shut your mouth and take a shot.”

I raised my hands in time to barely catch the ball in my hands. I could tell he wasn't angry at me because of his tone, but the random outburst was a bit strange.

But I raised the ball up in my hands again and threw it at the hoop. It looked like it would make it for a moment, but I barely missed the shot and watched it bounce off the rim.

“Man, you suck at this game,” he said as he chased after the ball. He picked it up again and ran back towards me, and stopped about a foot in front of me. “Now,” he said, looking me in the eye. “Turn around and look at the door over there.”

I raised my eyebrow, but turned around anyway. Standing by the door to the prison was Abby, talking to one of the guards, all while watching Damian and I playing basketball. I had no idea how long she had been standing there in the cold watching us. She smiled when she saw I had noticed her.

“There's that stupid look all over your face again,” Damian said. He shoved the basketball a little rougher into my stomach. “Now try to take another shot.”

I grasped the ball and sighed, unsure of why he was leading me back and forth like he was. I threw the ball again after a few seconds; this time, the ball whooshed straight through the hoop.

“Ahhh,” he said with a smile. “Now Superman can save the day, once he knows that his Lois Lane is watching him.”

He turned to look at me as the ball rolled farther away from the hoop.

“You feel like you can do anything when she's around. She makes you feel human again after Brayden. Abby and I are friends,” he said, then pointed at me. “You and Abby are in love with each other. You can stand here and preach your sermon all you want to, but I know better. I see it, and I hope one of these days you will, too, so you won't wait and miss out on something great.”

He walked away to grab the ball and made a few more shots, but I stood in place staring at the hoop, too dumbfounded. The shot I had managed to make couldn't be used to judge whether I was in love with a woman – but I was horrible at basketball. The shot could have been a fluke, but it seemed entirely too coincidental that it happened right after I knew Abby was watching.

I turned around and looked at the door again. Abby was still standing there, smiling at me, and after seeing my successful shot gave me a small thumbs-up gesture and winked her eye. I smiled back at her, hoping I didn't look as stupid as Damian had let on.

I hadn't thought anything could get more confusing after watching Brayden walk out of the prison and essentially walking out of my life. Abby had provided a certain comfort in my life the past three months that nobody else had been able to provide. I'd had my heart broken and had put up a guard against everybody – she had forced me to take that guard down so I could start to trust people again.

I didn't know if Damian was right, and I still had too much of my guard up to be able to see it – but the new dynamic had stirred up feelings I hadn't recognized in a long time. Now, normal was more distant than it had ever been.

Chapter 11

At first, it had started out funny. Hilarious, even. The notion that I was in love with Abby had thrown me for a loop admittedly, but when I thought about it it seemed ridiculous; and I had a lot of time to think about it. Abby and I had become close, yes, but as friends. Aside from Damian, Abby was the only person here who didn't treat me like a prisoner.

A few of the guards – mainly Roberta and John, the guard who always accompanied me to Abby's office in the morning – trusted me enough to play nice with me, and sometimes even talked to me like I was an equal. I was the “good boy” of the prison, a lot like I had been my whole life. But they had jobs to do, and never let me forget that they had power over me in case I decided to change my reputation.

Abby never used power or authority over me. She never reminded me that she was the boss. Some days I would slip into feeling bad, and I would look over at her and see her making a funny face at me, as if she knew I would look at her at that exact moment. I could never keep myself from laughing. I never wanted my day in the office to end. I never wanted my time with her to disappear.

And that was when I realized it wasn't funny anymore. It became reality, at least that my feelings for her had grown into something beyond simple friendship. Damian never let me forget that he thought I was in love with her, but I still wasn't convinced it had gone that far.

I had myself convinced until a couple of months later. I had found my one weakness.

That day, during the first couple of hours I was in Abby's office, general population was let out for some time in the yard. The story was passed down through prisoners and guards before it ever got to me and Abby, but the one thing we knew was that a riot had broken out. It didn't happen here often, but with men cooped up like animals in cages it did happen.

It was obvious to most that it was gang-related; I counted seven prisoners that came into Abby's office during that time. For her, it was like a Friday night at the local emergency room. I had never seen her so frantic. Even by the time everyone and had been bandaged up and given the green light, her adrenaline was still pumping so hard that she panicked at the simplest tasks.

After the last prisoner had left, she was searching a hundred miles per hour through a stack of papers that I hadn't had time to organize for her.

“I have to take this paperwork down,” she said, panicking. “Oh my Judas, I can't find it. Where the hell did I put it?”

I smiled and calmly reached over and grabbed a manilla folder, knowing exactly what papers she was looking for.

“What would you do without me?” I joked as I handed them over to her.

She grabbed the folder from my hands. “I would die. You're an angel sent straight from heaven. I have to run, I'll tell you more about how amazing you are when I get back.”

She leaned down and gave me a kiss on the cheek before she rushed out of the room as fast as she could. In her flight, I caught a whiff of her perfume and the feel of her lips on my cheek. It was the most pleasant feeling I'd felt all day – and yet it felt like I had a pair of hands wrapped tightly around my throat.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. Five months in prison hadn't brought me to my knees, but it took two seconds for the scent of lily-of-the-valley and a simple kiss on the cheek to bring me down. Only figuratively, of course, but that fall was the hardest one I had experienced in a long time.

I wasn't sure if it was that moment that I had fallen in love with her, or if I had felt it all along and I really was the only idiot who couldn't see it until now. I just knew it hurt – I had fallen in love with a woman I wasn't allowed to touch. They might as well have handcuffed me to the door of death row and threw away the key.

A couple weeks later, I apparently had caught a bad flu. The months I had been unable to sleep and eat properly had caught up with me and compromised my immune system. I spent two days in Abby's office, under her constant care instead of working, barely able to move from the fever and the nausea. The time she spent cooling off my face with a wet towel and talking to me until I fell asleep made all that pain hurt worse.

Another two weeks later I was feeling better, but not entirely back to my normal self. I was able to work again, but Abby had put me on a constant round of medicine to try to get rid of the bug. For several weeks she had come to my cell every night with pills in hand trying to help me kick it – and she always said good night to me before she left.

Watching her walk away from my cell at night with a smile, knowing I wouldn't see her again until morning, made everything I had been going through unbearable.

Then, there was that Thursday morning. It seemed as normal as it had been of late – I woke up sore, nauseous, and had trouble eating even a couple bites of breakfast. I still hadn't kicked whatever this was, and mornings were especially excruciating. Papers were askew all over Abby's desk because I hadn't been feeling up to par lately. Her desk chair felt harder than it usually was, like sitting on rocks at the beach. I felt like Hurricane Katrina part two had hit me and my workstation.

“Coffee,” I said the minute John left that morning. Coffee, water, and juice had been the only three things that didn't still make me feel sick. “Preferably in a constant IV drip, please.”

She had a full coffee mug, her favorite mug, already in hand and smiled at me – but her smile had changed since I had been sick. She stared at me twice as long as she normally did, and her smile was laced with some bad emotion that she was masking.

“Keep them coming, barkeep,” I said as I grabbed the mug and sat down.

“I want to put you on a new medicine. It's a little stronger than what you're on now and you won't like it because it might make you more tired than you already are – but that flu has been kicking your ass for a month. It's time for us to start kicking back.”

I groaned. “More medicine. I'm constantly drugged up already.”

“I want you to get better – even if that means you being constantly drugged up. I'm worried about you. I'll be bringing the first dose to you tonight. The good news is that it should help you get some sleep.”

“You know,” I said, “I'm thirty-something years old. I am capable of taking medicine on my own.”

“Yes, well, given your history of treating medicine like Skittles, I'll keep bringing them to you myself, thank you very much,” she said with that same hurt smile.

Clearly she was upset, but it had nothing to do with me or my prescription regimen. When I looked at her closer, I could see she was almost in tears. She had picked up a yellow mailing envelope and stared at it.

“Abby, what's wrong?” I asked.

“Huh?” she asked, snapping out of the trance the envelope had put her in.

“What's wrong? You look like you're about to cry.”

“Oh, no.” She pushed off her feelings, trying to hide what I knew I had seen. “I'm not crying. My eyes have been hurting for a few days. It's my eyes watering. I think I might be coming down with something. Guess I need to medicate myself, too.”

“Both of us medicated at the same time,” I said, acting as if I believed her when I didn't. “Doesn't sound like a good idea.”

She chuckled. “Speaking of medication – I have a few meds to pass around this morning for the other inmates.” She sat the envelope down in the corner of the desk, farther away from the rest of the papers. “I trust you'll be okay here?”

“What am I going to do, dig a tunnel under your desk and escape? I don't think I have the energy to even try.”

“Good. You have such a history of being a bad boy,” she said, feigning a smile. “I'll be back in a few minutes. Try not to get into any trouble while I'm gone.”

After she had disappeared from the infirmary hall, I looked at the envelope. The damn thing teased me – the way she looked at it, I knew that whatever it was in that envelope was upsetting to her. She wasn't sick; she was lying. And if she was lying to me, it had to be something big that she didn't want me to know about.

I had to find out what was in that envelope.

I snatched it up off the desk and before even I knew I had done it, the envelope was open and I was pulling papers out of it. I contemplated the fact that I was probably committing a felony now, even though she had opened the envelope already. I didn't care – another couple of years, maximum, and that was if I got caught. I had to know what was upsetting her.

A crisp white paper stared back at me. Welcome to St. John's University! It had been the last thing I had expected, truthfully.

I read through the acceptance letter twice – then looked through the list of books she needed, the new student orientation notice, a handwritten list of school supplies she needed to pick up. She had beautiful handwriting.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice from the door caught me by surprise. The envelope that had been resting on my lap dropped to the floor, along with a few papers. The list and acceptance letter stayed stationary in my hands.

“Are you looking through my mail?” she asked me in surprise, looking me in the eyes.

I sat the papers on the desk.

“Not on purpose. I thought you needed me to file them.”

“The fact that they had my home address and weren't in the filing pile didn't tip you off?” She walked over to me and snatched the papers off the desk and the floor angrily.

“I was only trying to do my job. I'm sorry.”

“You wanted to know what was wrong with me – now you do.” The tears came back into her eyes. “Are you satisfied now?”

“When did you apply to St. John's University?” I asked. “And now that we're on the subject, why didn't you tell me about it?”

“Personal information, Lance. And boundaries, which clearly, you have violated.”

“You know, I'm going to completely ignore that, because that hurt. St. John's University – it's not Yale or Harvard, but that is definitely nothing to sneeze at, and yet I think I'm happier for you than you are for yourself.”

“Because I can't go,” she said, fighting back the tears unsuccessfully. “I can't afford to go. So if you could be a little less happy for me, I'd feel a lot better about it.”

She pulled a paper out of the stack and looked at briefly before handing it to me.

“I'm not happy because I can't afford to be happy. If you'd looked a little harder, you'd have realized that happiness costs a lot of money lately.”

I grabbed the paper out of her hand and looked it over. It was a list of the cost of two semesters of college – totaling an incredible amount of over $30,000.

“You're right,” I said, sobered by the number. “I guess when you graduate high school by mail traveling on a tour bus, you don't realize these things.”

“I guess when you graduate nursing school with the help of student loans, and a little bit of pocket change that your mom started sacking away for you in a coffee can when you were two, you don't realize how much a big college like St. John's will cost you in the long run.” She walked over and filled her coffee cup back up, and wiped a couple of tears away from her cheeks. “I still have student loan bills coming out of my ears because of all the interest charges.”

“But there are scholarships and grants out there.”

“Not for me.” She walked back over to me and turned to the second page, pointing at a list of numbers. “See all those zeroes? That's the amount they want to give me for college. There are a couple of grants available for me, but Lance, they're not enough. My mom saved up more in that coffee can than they want to give me.”

I stared at the list a little harder, trying to figure out how it could be possible that there was no money for Abby.

“That coffee can money is long gone,” she said with a sad smile. “And it looks like my chances of going back to school to get that degree in psychology went with it. Do you know how I knew I wanted to be a nurse?”

I didn't say anything, still baffled and frustrated by the papers.

“When I was eight, my dad went to prison. He had a gambling problem and lost too much money. It got to be too much to keep hiding from my mom, and he didn't want to lose her or me or my sister. So to hide all that money, he decided he would embezzle it from the company he had built with his business partner and best friend. His best friend caught him and pressed charges, and my dad got fifteen years. My mom was a nurse at the local hospital and for some reason I didn't know at the time, she quit her job at the hospital and went to work at the prison my dad was at. I truly thought she was crazy. I couldn't understand why she would want to leave a great job at the hospital and go to work with a bunch of criminals.”

“Misfits,” I said.

“Well, yeah, that's what she called them. At the time, I called them criminals. No offense, but her job at the hospital paid enough that we could have gotten by while my dad was away, and she left it to go take care of men that, at the time, I didn't think deserved the level of care that she could provide. She cut our income and she put herself at risk every day by being around murderers and rapists. I was mad at her. And all she could tell me was 'Abigail, money isn't everything. Faith in people is important too.' I tried, I really did. I didn't see it, I didn't understand. But then I started putting aside my anger and discrimination against the men she was around and I started seeing that she came home satisfied with the work she was doing. She was never that satisfied working at the hospital. I guess working with misfits gave her that.”

“And so you decided you wanted to be a prison nurse too. You wanted that same satisfaction your mom came home with.”

“I've been here for seven years and normally I'm satisfied with my job. But lately it hasn't been enough. Guys come in here with cuts and scrapes and bruises and I clean and stitch them up. But when they're in here, I notice something that I don't think my mom ever did – the inside wounds. The emotional pain, not the physical stuff.”

“Like when I came in here,” I said.

“You were depressed, hopeless, and angry – at everyone, including me. I helped you, but with my limited resources, I can't help them all. I want to. I want to do more than stitch up cuts the rest of my life.”

“And without this aid, you can't afford to.”

“Not even close. I've been applying for three or four months. I've Googled every grant, scholarship, and type of aid that I could think of. Some of them aren't for psychology students. Some of them require me to have more credit hours per semester than I can take. Most of them I make too much money to qualify for. It's funny that I make too much for most financial aid out there, but I'm drowning in student loans already.”

“I suppose that cutting your hours here at the prison isn't an option either,” I said.

“No,” she responded. “I still have to pay my bills and eat. Besides, I have way too much responsibility here. I'm close with a lot of these guys, and they depend on me. I can't let them down. I can't leave you here alone either.”

“I don't want you to stay here for me, Abby. If this is about me...”

She chuckled. “It's not all about you. You're only a small part of it.”

A pang of guilt cut through my chest, and I sat down in the chair and looked at the paper again, feeling frustrated.

She paused, then pulled over a chair and sat in front of me.

“I guess that's not true. Truthfully, Lance, a big part of it is that I can't leave until I know you're going to go home. I'm too invested in you. I can't leave until I see you go home to your daughter and back to a normal life.”

“Well, I think we have a problem, because now I have to see you go back to college,” I said.

She leaned in a little closer to put her hand on my cheek and smiled, but this time it was a truly happy smile.

“You're so sweet. I don't know how you managed to make it here. And you have a natural talent for making me put things into perspective. I adore you for it.”

She leaned into me and placed another kiss on my cheek. I felt her breath on my cheek; it was warm since I was still a little cold from a lingering fever. It made me turn my head around towards her as she started to pull back.

As I turned, she stopped pulling back and looked me in the eyes, inches away from my face. Everything in the room had changed so quickly. My cheeks felt flush, like my fever had come back.

Before I could think too much about my fever, Abby was leaning in closer to me. Within seconds, I felt her lips on mine. She lingered there for a few seconds and just when I expected her to pull away in shock, she pulled me slightly closer to her.

It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like it lasted longer. When she opened her mouth to mine, I could taste her lip gloss on my lips. I felt her breathe as she pulled away from me, still holding my cheek close to her face.

“I'm really sorry,” she whispered. “I crossed a line that I shouldn't have.”

She pulled away from, more quickly than I wanted her to, and sprinted over to to the counter to pick up a clipboard.

“I forgot to take my clipboard with me this morning,” she said. She avoided looking me in the eyes. “I should get back to work now.”

She walked out the door without a goodbye, and I was left in my seat frozen. I wasn't sure what had happened to change things between us so quickly. I sighed and reached up, wiping the rest of her lip gloss off my mouth.

I had to lay my head down on the desk before I passed out, and I wasn't sure it was because of the fever or the atmosphere. So many things had changed in a few months that I felt my head might spin. One thing I was grateful for was that Brayden was no longer the person on my mind the most. But now things with Abby had gone from uncomfortable to complicated; too complicated for me to deal with by myself, in prison. She wasn't the only one who was too invested.

One of the first things I had to do before dealing with my feelings was get her to college, one way or another. The problem wasn't knowing how or coming up with a plan, because I already had a plan – the problem was the rules I would have to break in order to get her there. It could compromise everything for me, being almost halfway through my sentence and so close to going home. If it went wrong, I could be here longer than I had ever intended to be.

But if it went right, it could make all the time I had spent here mean something. To me, that made the risk worth taking.

Chapter 12

The more I thought about it, the more sure of myself and my plan I became. I had two days to think about it, and I knew I had to be absolutely sure of it before I executed it.

Today Joey was coming in for another visit, and we had talked it over and agreed that now was a better time than ever to bring Bailey in for a visit. Her fifth birthday was coming up, and I obviously had no hope of being out.

In fact, it was becoming pretty clear to me that I couldn't hope to be out before I had served a full year. I hadn't heard anything from my lawyer in two months – he hadn't called or even visited. Even Joey said phone calls came less frequently and only lasted minutes, long enough for Rich to tell him that he had been too busy working on other cases and would be able to get to it soon.

I was nearly at my breaking point. It didn't help that for the past two days, things with Abby had been awkward at best. We hadn't spoken a word about the kiss. She could barely talk to me or look me in the eye, much less talk about what happened between us. I didn't want to overstep my boundaries so I avoided talking unless I needed to, and I kept to the desk and focused on my job most of the day to avoid any uncomfortable contact with her.

Today, she had greeted me when I walked through the door that morning, but it was shortly after one in the afternoon and we hadn't talked much since then. But she sat down in the chair beside the desk to eat her lunch, surprising me.

“It's visiting day,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you have anybody coming?”

“Joey. And my daughter,” I said with a sigh, feeling the butterflies come back.

“I bet you're excited.”

“More nervous.”

“Why are you nervous?”

I sat the pen I was using to write down on the desk and leaned back in the chair to look at her. It was the most she had spoken to me since she had kissed me; but I wasn't going to complain.

“I'm nervous about how she's going to react, and how it's going to affect her. I'm nervous about how she's going to deal with it when she has to leave with Joey and I can't go with her. I'm nervous about what to tell her, because she's going to ask questions about this place and why I can't come home, or when I'm coming home.”

“You have two choices,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “You either tell her the truth, or you tell her a lie.”

“Thanks. That helps me a lot,” I said with a chuckle.

She got quiet and stabbed through a grape with her fork. Instead of putting it in her mouth, she looked it over for a few seconds.

“About the other day, Lance...I don't know what to say. I feel like I should apologize, but...”

“You know what, Ab,” I said, holding up my hand to silence her. “Let's just...let's not go there today, okay? I have too much to worry about today to fall down that rabbit hole and get lost there.”

Both of us went quiet and looked at each other, but quickly went back to what we were doing.

“Kids come through here every now and then,” she said. “Usually they're fine. Most of the time, the worst thing that happens is they cry when they have to leave.”

“Most of the time.”

“Ninety-five percent of the time.”

“And then there's that five percent...”

“Stop,” she said with a laugh, the first I'd heard from her in a couple of days. “I think you're worrying needlessly. I think she'll be fine. I think you'll both handle it fine.”

“You put too much faith in me.”

“You beat yourself up too much,” she said.

“Abby, my daughter's fifth birthday is in three weeks. I won't be there. I can't even help plan her party. I can't buy her a gift. I can't watch her blow out her candles.” I sighed. “Everybody says I'm beating myself up too much. Well of course I'm beating myself up – I'm missing out on a whole fucking year of my daughter's life, and I can't get it back.”

She paused and leaned in toward me.

“It's a birthday, sweetie,” she said softly. “It's only a birthday. And it's one of many birthdays. She'll have more of them. Every holiday you've been here you've beat yourself up all day over it. You've made yourself feel so bad all day because you can't be there. But it's not your fault that you're not there. It's her fault.”

She put emphasis on her; she had a certain disgust in her voice when talking about Brayden.

“There will be more birthdays, more Christmases, more Thanksgivings – and you'll be there for every one of them.”

I sighed.

“Want my advice?” she said as she stabbed through another grape.

“Can't hurt,” I said.

“Lie through your teeth to Bailey.”

I stopped and looked at her, telling her with my eyes I was displeased with her advice.

“Don't look at me like I just killed your dog,” she said. “She's four. I'm not saying you should tell her this is Disneyworld, but you shouldn't tell her the truth. And lying to her isn't going to permanently damage like you think it is.”

“A lie is a lie, Ab.”

“Do you tell your daughter that the Easter Bunny exists?”

I laughed. “Um...duh.”

“Thank you, sir, for proving my point.”

I shook my head at her, but I was grateful that she had me laughing again.

“Seriously, I know you don't think you are, but you're an amazing father,” she said, her tone changing back to serious. “You've sacrificed everything to make sure she has a good home while you're here. Look what you put up with so she would have a mother and a father.”

I looked away from her.

“Sometimes things don't work out the way we want them to, Lance. We can't change it and we certainly can't wallow in our own pity about it. We can't take a step forward and then take five steps back. It doesn't do us any good.”

She paused for a minute and popped the grape in her mouth that she had been holding for so long.

“Thanks, Abby,” I said.

She smiled. “You're welcome. You know I love ya, troublemaker.”

I smiled at her, but quickly went back to work. The mere mention of the word “love” out of her mouth made my heart fall into my stomach.

I wanted to talk with her about it, but at the same time I didn't want to. What happened between us – I didn't regret any of it, or look back on it as something that shouldn't have happened. From the way she regarded it, she did. She acted like it would never happen again – and that really was a rabbit hole that I didn't need to fall through today, with Bailey coming in.

A couple seconds later, I felt something cold and slightly wet hit my ear. I put my hand up to my ear and looked over at Abby to see her giggling with a grape in her hand, ready to launch it at me.

“How old are you?” I said with a laugh.

“You looked like you were lost in thought and never coming back to me.”

I picked up the grape off the desk and threw it back at her, hitting the side of her nose and eliciting a strong laugh from her.

“I was just thinking that you should come down with me this afternoon and meet my daughter,” I said.

She stopped laughing so abruptly that I swore she would choke on one of her grapes.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“That's a...big step,” she said, and I could tell it made her nervous.

“I...care about you,” I said, wanting to avoid the fact that I'd almost slipped in a bad way. “You're one of the most important people in my life. I want you to meet her.”

“If that's what you want,” she said, and took a deep breath, “then yes, I'll come down and meet her. But Lance, I'm...I'm not so good with kids.”

I smiled. “I find that incredibly hard to believe.”

The phone rang as she was about to respond, and she went to answer it. She answered it in her normal greeting and paused to listen on the other end. It only took a few seconds for her to respond and hang up.

“They're here,” she said as she looked over to me.

When we looked at each other, it seemed like both of us were equally nervous.

We were silent most of the walk down to the visiting area. My stomach felt tighter than sailor's knots. She walked with her hands in the pockets of her scrub top, watching every step I took.

“Everything will be fine, Lance,” she finally said.

“This was a bad idea. Prison isn't a place for a four-year-old.”

“Put a smile on your face. Pretend like nothing's wrong.”

We reached the doors to the visiting area and she laid her hand on the door handle, but didn't open it right away.

“Couldn't hurt for you to smile for your own sake, either,” she said, looking at me.

I took a deep breath as she opened the door for me, and walked through. It was still early in visiting hours so there weren't a lot of people around yet. I didn't have to look long to pick out Joey and Bailey – sitting at a table close to the doors. Bailey's back was turned to me, sitting on her knees on the seat, talking to Joey about something.

Kelly had put her hair into a ponytail full of bouncy, dirty blonde waves. Her hair reminded me of her mother's.

Joey saw me and pointed at me when he said something to Bailey, and she turned around.

“Daddy!”

She was off the seat in two steps and ran straight into my arms.

“God, Bailey, I've missed you so much.” I ran my fingers through her ponytail and gave her a kiss on the cheek, where I had to hide my face because I couldn't stop one tear from slipping through what felt like superhuman self-control. She had her arms wrapped so tightly around my neck that I could barely breathe, but I couldn't bring myself to move them.

Joey walked over to us, looking suspiciously at Abby.

“Daddy, why haven't you come home?”

She looked at me and I looked at her. This was the minute I had been dreading for the past month.

“Bailey,” Abby said before I could speak, “your daddy hasn't come home because he's been helping me.”

Abby walked up to the two of us, and Bailey eyed her for a moment.

“Who are you?” she finally said.

“I'm Abby.” She smiled at Bailey and held out her hand to her, but Bailey shied away from her insecurely.

“This is my friend, Bailey,” I said.

“Your daddy talks about you all the time,” Abby told her. “And you look just like your dad. You're so gorgeous.”

“Daddy says I look like my mommy.”

Abby shook her head. “I see your daddy all over you. Your daddy's eyes, your daddy's hair, and even your daddy's nose – this little button nose.” She reached over and gently poked Bailey's nose, which made her laugh and dig her face into my shoulder.

I pulled her close to me for a moment, but she quickly pushed herself away from me and closer towards Abby.

“Your hair is pretty too, Abby.” She gently grabbed a handful of Abby's dark hair. Then she observed her work ID tag and her clothing. “Are you a nurse?”

“Yes, I am,” Abby said with a smile.

“Do you give people shots?”

I chuckled.

“Sometimes,” Abby said. “But mostly I give them medicine when they're sick, and make them feel better when they get hurt.”

“Have you been taking care of my daddy?”

“I have a couple times. But your daddy has been helping me out a lot, too.”

“How does he help you?” Bailey asked quizzically.

“Well, he's been helping me do my paperwork – and he's been helping me take care of people. Did you know your daddy is very good at taking care of people when they're sick?”

Bailey nodded. “Yeah. Daddy takes care of me when I'm sick. But uncle Joey has been taking care of me now.”

Abby looked over at Joey, and Joey smiled at her a little.

“Your uncle Joey does a really good job of taking care of you, doesn't he?” Abby said.

“Yeah. But I miss my daddy,” Bailey said.

Abby's face turned sad, but she recovered quickly.

“Bailey, I hear you're having a birthday,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“I'm four, but I'll be five soon.”

“Wow,” Abby said, feigning shock. “Five years old! You're all grown up. Are you going to have a party?”

Bailey's mood immediately improved.

“Yeah. I'm having a princess party. Uncle Joey is even letting me dress up like Cinderella.”

“I love Cinderella,” Abby said.

“I do too. Want to come to my birthday party, Abby? We're going to have cake.”

I was shocked for a moment, and I could tell by looking at Abby that she was too.

“Wow, Cinderella and cake,” she said. “That sounds like a great party. I guess if it's okay with your daddy and uncle Joey, I would love to come.”

I looked over at Joey, who finally had a warming smile on his face.

“Of course,” he said. “I'll give Lance all the details before we leave. The more, the merrier.”

I could tell that Bailey got excited.

“You can dress up like a princess too, Abby!”

Abby laughed. “Well, maybe a modest princess.”

“And my daddy can come with you!” Bailey said.

Abby's facial expression dropped, and she looked at me begging me for what to say.

“Bailey,” Joey said, jumping in. “Listen sweetie, only Abby can come. Daddy will have to stay here a little while longer.”

“But why, Uncle Joey?” Bailey whined.

The three of us were silent for a moment, wondering what to say to her, before Abby spoke up.

“Well, Bailey,” she said, “your daddy got in trouble.”

I looked over at her and she smiled at me, then looked back at Bailey.

“Yes, Bailey, your daddy got in big trouble. You know what he did?”

“What?”

“He threw grapes at my head,” Abby said matter-of-factly. “He threw his grapes at my head and we had to put him in time-out for a while. He can't come to your party because he's not allowed to have cake. Because you can't have cake when you're in trouble, right?”

“That's right,” Bailey said, then she turned to look at me. “Daddy, you're not supposed to throw your food,” she said in a scolding manner.

I couldn't help but laugh at her serious tone. “I know, sweetie. I did a bad thing. I'm sorry.”

“Don't do it again, daddy,” she said, pointing her finger at me. I could see she had paid way too much attention those times when I had to do the same to her.

I looked over at Joey, who silently breathed a sigh of relief with a smile on his face.

“I have to get back to my office now,” Abby said to me. “I have a ton of things to finish up.” She turned to look at Bailey. “I can't wait for your birthday party, Bailey.”

“Abby,” I said as she turned to leave.

She stopped and turned around to look at me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“No problem,” she said with a smile.

“Bye, Abby!” Bailey yelled excitedly, and I wrapped my arm around her a little tighter.

“Bye, Miss Bailey,” Abby said, and waved at Bailey before she walked out the door.

Bailey wriggled out of my arms and back to Joey, who picked her back up and walked over to me.

“Wow,” he said. “I fell in love with her a little too.”

“I'm that good at hiding it, huh?”

“Yeah, about that good,” he responded.

“Well, then maybe it won't be so shocking to you that I have a huge favor to ask you before you leave.”

As I predicted, Joey turned around and looked at me with a concerned look on his face.

“Why do I have a feeling that this is like, the Titanic sinking huge and it's a really bad idea?”

I smiled at him and walked over to one of the tables to sit down and enjoy my visit with them.

Our hour and a half went by in what seemed like fifteen minutes. Bailey spent at least thirty minutes gushing to me about all the things she was doing in her preschool class. She poured over how much fun she was having playing with her “cousins” while she was staying with Joey. Then she moved on to talking about her birthday party. She was so excited that she didn't mention me coming home again once.

Joey eventually distracted her by asking her to sing the alphabet song for me.

“Okay, tell me about this favor,” he said quietly as she sang.

“You said you'd do anything to help me out, right? We're brothers and all that?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You'd even do it if it might mean I'd get caught and be here longer than planned?”

“You're seriously freaking me out right now, Lance. You're not usually the type to do things that get yourself in trouble. Not on purpose, anyway.”

“Daddy!” Bailey interrupted. “Did you hear me? I did the whole alphabet by myself!”

“That was great, sweetheart. Can you do it again for me?”

She started singing again, accompanying it with her own choreographed dance. Joey looked over at me and I looked at him.

I sighed. “Joey, you just have to trust me.”

Chapter 13

Watching my daughter leave through the doors had been the hardest thing I'd had to deal with. It made fighting my feelings for Abby feel like peanuts. I knew I wouldn't see my Bailey again for months, because one of the other favors I asked of Joey was to never bring her back here again.

But I was sure of one thing – once I saw the way that Abby and Bailey warmed up to each other and lit up in smiles when they interacted, I knew what I was doing was the right thing.

So a week later when she came in and slammed a yellow envelope on the desk in front of me, it was a shock.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

The slap of the envelope against the wood and papers snapped me out of work-mode.

“Huh?”

“Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.”

I shrugged, because even though she thought I should, I had no idea why she was so upset.

“Go ahead,” she said angrily. “Open the envelope. You certainly have a penchant for opening my mail anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “Will you ever get over that?”

“Probably not.”

I opened the envelope and removed the papers. The first thing I recognized was the letterhead – my lawyer's.

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said, before I had even finished reading. “Someone anonymously donated a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to me, completely out of the blue. It even has its own bank account, waiting for me. And I only know one person who could have that kind of money to donate.”

She looked at me accusingly.

“You don't know that this is from me,” I said defensively.

“Really? You made God-only-knows how much money from selling all those albums and you're the only person I've recently told about my financial troubles with school. Math isn't my strong suit but I know two plus two equals four.”

“Give me a calculator and a few minutes and I could argue with that if it will benefit me.”

She pursed her lips slightly in my direction.

“I have medical training. I know all the ways to kill a man – all the many painful, bloody ways. I won't hesitate to use them if you insult my intelligence.”

I backed off.

“Fine. No need to get violent. It was me. Are you satisfied? You lose your sense of humor when you're mad.”

“You know what?” she said. “I'm not satisfied. What in the hell were you thinking? Were you trying to pay me off for something?”

I scoffed. “No.”

“Are you trying to get yourself in trouble? Or get me in trouble or even fired?”

“No, Abby.”

“Then what in the world were you trying to do?” she yelled. “Throw your money around? Did you see a charity opportunity or a tax break when you looked at me? Poor broke Abby, she can't afford to go back to school so let's give her some money and be a hero!”

I was more than shocked at what she was saying.

“Is that really what you think of me? Wow, Abby.”

“What else could it be?” she asked. “You come in here and know me for a couple of months and all of a sudden you give me all this money like I'm some damn charity case.”

“And you're so off-base.”

“Set me straight, then,” she said, with a challenging tone. “If I'm so off-base, set me back on track. You didn't give me the money to cause trouble or do a good deed, so why did you do it?”

She was slowly walking closer to me with an intent look in her eye, pinning me between the wall and her.

“I know what it was,” she said. “You thought if you paid for me to go to school, I'd be so grateful that you could get inside my pants. You'd ride in and save the day and it would make my panties melt right off me.”

She was looking me in the eye with a fiery and seductive but mean look, one I had never seen from her.

“You have to be the white knight that makes women melt into your arms. You have that effect on women, and you need to save them, am I right?”

I wasn't known for losing my temper, but she had gone too far. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

“You want to know why I gave you the money?” I asked.

“It would be refreshing,” she said snidely.

“I gave you that money because I love you.”

Her face softened, but she said nothing.

“I love you so much that it physically hurts, because I can't touch you. I have so much more freedom in here than I expected, but I still might as well be in chains all day. I thought maybe if I knew you could go back to school and I got to see you happy, it would make that pain stop. It hurts worse. The way I saw you with my daughter last week is how I always imagined my life with her would be after she was born. And I can't do anything about it.”

I waited for her to speak, but she continued to stare at me.

“I ended up in prison trying to save my ex. I gave up my rights to my daughter trying to save her. I'm done trying to save people. Now all I want is to get back to my daughter and see you happy. I'm not saving shit anymore, because all it does is come back to bite me in the ass.”

With her face inches away from mine, I could see tears in her eyes.

“Now you know,” I said.

Her stare continued, but her face had turned from heated to unreadable. Before I knew it, she had walked away from me and rushed out the door.

I sat back down at the desk and stared at the papers I had been working on moments before, but eventually I gave up and held my head in my hands. Abby had gone too far, but so had I. I had been pushed to my breaking point. Unfortunately it was her who pushed me there, and I had taken it out on her.

The atmosphere had changed so drastically, so quickly. I never blew up at women like that, but I was realizing that I wasn't the same person now that I was before I got here. I had become afraid that I wouldn't be capable of going back to myself once I got out. I didn't know whether I would be able to go back to my normal life, and raise Bailey like I had before.

Abby came back ten minutes later, but she said nothing. I went back to my work and she went back to hers; we both avoided looking at each other, and neither of us talked for hours. She went to another room to eat her lunch instead of coming to sit with me at the desk. I tried to keep to my own space and give her some of her own, while she busied herself – but I didn't dare look over to see what she was doing.

I was looking through papers when I heard her curse out loud and the sound of metal drop to the floor. I looked over to see her holding one of her fingers.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I cut myself,” she said, still avoiding looking at me directly.

Hesitantly, I walked over and pulled her hand away and saw a cut at least an inch long at the base of her thumb. The long sleeve of her shirt was quickly soaking up the blood from her finger.

“It might need stitches. We need to get it cleaned, just to make sure.”

She tried pulling her hand away from me. “I'm sure it will be fine.”

“Would you stop being stubborn and let me clean it up?”

She paused, but stopped pulling her arm away and let me lead her over to the chair. I pulled a few cotton pads and some disinfectant out of her cabinets and sat down in my own chair in front of her.

“I hate blood,” she said when I pushed her sleeve up to her elbow.

“You're a nurse, and you hate blood?” I said, laughing a little.

“Well I can handle it when it's other people's blood, but my own makes me sick.”

I looked at the cut, and even thought it was small, it was bleeding quite a bit.

“You better look away then,” I said.

She was silent while I cleaned the blood off her finger and applied pressure to it to stop the bleeding. Occasionally she looked down at the cut, but she would quickly look away.

“How does it look?” she finally asked.

“It's still bleeding,” I said. “I can't tell. How did you cut yourself anyway?”

“I was cleaning my instruments because that's what I do when I'm upset. I guess I got too aggressive and I cut myself on the surgical scissors.” She chuckled. “What a klutz, right?”

“Maybe you should rethink cleaning sharp instruments when you're upset,” I said, smiling at her.

After a few moments of silence, she said, “I'm sorry for everything I said earlier. I'm so sorry.”

I shook my head. “Don't worry about it. We both lost our heads. I shouldn't have said the things I did, and I should have asked you about the money first.”

“You know I would have said no anyway,” she said. “My pride – it's huge. It gets in the way a lot, keeps me from asking for help and accepting it gracefully – without yelling and insulting famous pop stars.”

I chuckled.

“It's a lot of money,” she said. “It will take me years to pay all this back.”

“I don't want you to pay me back. Call it a thank you gift, for all that you've done for me since I've been here.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“A hundred and fifty thousand dollars is your idea of a thank you gift?”

“Well, I wanted to go with a bottle of wine, but Joey refused to smuggle it in for me.”

I looked up to see her smiling at me, which did a lot to loosen my mood and the tension in the room.

“What if the prison thinks you're paying me off for something?” she asked.

It was one of the first things I had thought about. I had watched reality crime shows a few times when I was waiting up for Brayden to come home, and one of the most intriguing was about a prisoner who had seduced one of the guards into a relationship with him and asked her to help him escape. I knew I'd never do that, and I knew Abby never would either, but it could be taken that way.

“If they don't know about it, they can't think anything,” I said. “None of the money has my name on it yet. It came out of Joey's bank account and into my lawyer's hands, who set up the account, almost like a trust. They could trace it back to Joey, but they can't prove he's doing anything wrong. If I'm not doing anything wrong here and I'm keeping myself clean, there should be no issues. You just can't say anything to anybody about who gave you the money.”

“How am I supposed to explain where all this money came from?”

“Tell them a distant relative died and left it for you or something. Don't tell them the truth and it should be okay.”

That seemed to satisfy her curiosity, and she was quiet while I finished cleaning the cut. Once I had cleaned all the blood off her hand, I looked closer at the cut.

“Well, you've stopped bleeding,” I said. “It's not that deep so I don't think you'll need stitches.”

“How did you get so good at this?”

“I have a daughter. She's a walking, talking accident waiting to happen. I may not have medical training, but I'm a dad who is well-trained in princess Band-Aids and boo-boos.”

She smiled at me, and I started soaking a fresh piece of cotton with the disinfectant. When I pressed it to the cut, she flinched from the sting. I caressed her wrist with my thumb, and it didn't go unnoticed by her.

“When did you fall in love with me?”

I looked up at her and tried to swallow the lump in my throat.

“I don't know. Somewhere between the day I pulled my head out of my ass and the day Damian told me, I guess.”

She looked at me curiously.

“Damian told you?”

“He said he saw the way we looked at each other and he knew. I thought he was crazy, and he was talking to hear himself talk. You know Damian.”

I chuckled, but she didn't.

“How long have you felt this way?” she asked.

“A couple months. Maybe longer. I didn't intend to tell you about it, ever. I intended to finish this out and move on with my life.”

“That night you came in here,” she said, “I was here late trying to do all this paperwork. I was finally getting ready to go home for the night and I stopped to talk to Roberta before her shift ended and the night guards came in. I looked over and I thought I saw you laying on the floor. It was weird, so I had Roberta follow me over to check on you. By the time we got you in here, the Oxycontin had slowed your heart rate way down and you were barely breathing on your own. I've been a nurse here for seven years and all that time, I've never had something like that happen. I was terrified.”

In all this time, it hadn't occurred to me that that night could have been terrifying for her as well.

“For a while I thought you were in really bad shape. I was about to get you to the hospital, because I didn't think you'd make it here. I thought maybe I waited too late to get you to the hospital, too. That scared me even more. Then you started improving, thankfully. But that feeling I felt when I thought you wouldn't – that freaked me out. I've never felt that before. I've done volunteer work in hospitals and watched people die in the ER, but I've never felt like that. It's like...I was attached to you, I couldn't let go. I thought it was because you're you. I'd be the most hated woman in the world if I let Lance from *NSYNC die. I'd have to hide underground.”

I laughed, because it probably wasn't far from the truth.

“But then I realized that for a moment, when I didn't know if you were going to be okay, I wanted to give up nursing – and psychology, too. Everything I worked so hard for in school, everything I'm trying to work for, everything here that means so much to me – I wanted to let it all go. And those feelings didn't go away either. After you started working here with me, they got worse. When you got the flu, your fever made you delirious. I decided that night to stay here and monitor you, because you were comfortable here. You were laying here saying things that didn't even make any sense. It was actually pretty funny.”

She chuckled for a moment.

“But then that night I was sitting here and you started talking about me,” she said with a smile.

“Do I even want to know what I said?” I asked, feeling embarrassed about the possibilities.

“Probably not. It was the fever. But there was one thing that stuck with me. I started talking to you and you responded to me like you were awake. You kept telling me you loved me. I thought it was the fever, but that hurt – because I realized that I loved you too.”

I looked down and realized I still had the soaked cotton pressed on her thumb. I threw it in the trash and stood up to get a bandage.

“Don't avoid me.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me back gently. “I just told you I loved you too and you're running away from it because you're scared. I can't let you tell me you love me and then run away from me.”

I sat back down in the seat and looked her in the eyes. After remembering how I felt in the days after the kiss, my first reaction was to run away from those feelings. But as usual, she was making me face my feelings head-on and not letting me back down.

“I am scared,” I said. “I'm in prison. It scares me to have these feelings. It scares me even more to know you have these feelings too, because I can't even touch you. We can't be together.”

Her face was like stone as she shook her head.

“They can't keep us apart forever. We can work through that.”

“This is not something we can easily work through, Abby,” I said with a sigh. “I can't make you wait around for me. You don't deserve that.”

Finally, her expression softened into a smile.

“It's not like waiting for you would be a prison sentence for me,” she said. “I see you almost every day. We have coffee together, we talk about our day, joke and make each other laugh, say goodnight before we leave. Isn't that the kind of stuff that a good relationship is built on?”

Ever since Brayden's personality had drastically changed, I found it too hard to look into the future too far. It had kept me from committing to marry her, because I stopped being able to predict anything. When I got here, it became painful to look forward to the future because it felt too far away. I had forced myself into an endless cycle of living my life day-by-day, only facing things that I had to deal with right away.

“So we have to wait around a while,” she said, barely above a whisper. “For all the other stuff, I mean. Who cares? That stuff is great, but what I have with you is great already, Lance. That makes waiting for everything else worth it.”

She sat looking at me for a few moments.

“What are you thinking?” she asked when I didn't say anything.

“I'm thinking of how stupid I've been,” I said. “I let myself get consumed by all these little things. I'm not used to being stuck in a place like this, sleeping on a hard bed. I can't just pick up the phone and call someone whenever I want to or need to. I don't get to tuck Bailey in every night. All that sucks and it's not ideal and I'd like to change it – but she's fed, clothed, taken care of and I'll get back to her soon. That alone is a miracle because if it weren't for you, I could have died.”

She looked me straight in the eyes, her expression unreadable.

“This isn't who I am, Abby. I don't let myself get consumed with this stuff. Have you ever felt like you've been hurting so bad that you've been drowning yourself? Then someone comes along and pulls you out. You're trying to catch your breath and you realize they gave you a second chance to live your life. You realize you created your problems and made them so big that you felt like you were drowning in the ocean, but you were only drowning in an inch of water.”

She smiled, and grabbed my hand.

“I didn't pull you out. All I did was make you realize that you could stand. You're capable of standing on your own two feet.”

“But why did it take me so long to figure it out?” I asked.

“Sometimes you hurt too bad.” She squeezed my hand. “It takes over your whole life. It takes time to get over things. But I won't let you go back to that.”

Before I knew it, she had pulled me in close to her and had her lips pressed against mine. Unlike the last time, neither of us were hesitant. I pulled her face closer to mine, tasting her lip gloss and smelling her perfume again, letting it finally conjure up good feelings instead of bad ones.

After a few seconds she pulled away, but held her forehead against mine.

“I love you,” she said again. “And if I have to wait, that doesn't matter to me. We'll make it through that.”

“We'll make it through that,” I said. I didn't need confirmation anymore. I knew she was right.

Chapter 14

“Why are you doing this, Abigail?”

That had been my mother's question. My father's questions had been worse – and I was sitting in my car, in the driveway of Joey's house, asking myself most of the same questions.

My mother knew me like the back of my hand. We had squabbled when I was a teenager over little things, like most mothers and daughters at that age, but we always had a good relationship. Our bond was strong, since she raised me alone for a good portion of my life. She was in tune with me, and there was something in my voice that told her something was different.

“Abigail,” she had said disapprovingly. “Be careful.”

She was a mother; she worried about me and that was to be expected, and it worried her even more that I was involved with an inmate. It was probably one of her fears. When I became a prison nurse, everybody except my mom thought I was insane – now my mom had jumped on the wagon, too.

But I had spent the past six months with Lance every single day. I couldn't explain how my feelings for him were so strong, but I felt like I had known him my entire life. I knew from the beginning that he didn't belong at Warren. Something about him was different than the other inmates – he was angry at the whole world, but he didn't scare me.

What did scare me was Bailey's birthday party. I saw the way Joey looked at me when he visited. I had appeared out of nowhere to him and he was unsure of me, and after Lance's little money scheme I had no idea what he thought about me. I didn't have a clue what I would be walking into today.

I sighed a heavy breath of air to calm my nerves and looked at the box sitting in the passenger seat next to me, wrapped in pink paper with a sheer white ribbon. This was why I was here; I had fallen in love with this little girl most of all.

“Abby,” Joey said when he opened the door to me, smiling. “I didn't expect you so soon.”

“I thought maybe you needed some help setting up,” I said. “So I came a little early.”

“You didn't have to, but now that you're here that would be a big help,” he said.

He invited me in with his body language and led me through the living room. I looked over and saw Bailey and two other girls playing together.

“Those are my daughters,” Joey said, seeing me looking at them. “Brianna just turned eleven and Kloey is two. And of course you know Bailey.” He turned to look at the girls. “Girls, this is our friend Abby, can you say hello?”

Kloey didn't even look up, and Brianna looked up and gave me a friendly “hello”; but when Bailey heard my name, she stood up and sprinted toward me.

“Abby!”

“Hey there, kiddo,” I said. She grabbed onto my leg and wrapped her body around it. “Have you had a good birthday?”

“Yeah,” she said and smiled excitedly. “Aunt Kelly made my favorite breakfast this morning.”

“What's your favorite breakfast?”

“Pancakes with blueberry syrup and orange juice.”

“Oh, that sounds yummy.” Compared to the slightly-burnt toast I had managed for myself before I ran out of the house this morning, it sounded delicious.

“Is my daddy with you?” Bailey asked.

Lance had warned me that Bailey probably wouldn't remember the discussion we had with her that day at the prison, and she would probably ask me about him again. Together, we had come up with the perfect excuse.

“No, sweetie,” I said. “He couldn't come because he had to work today. But this present is from both of us.”

She looked at the box under my arm.

“Okay,” she said, rather nonchalantly. “I'm going to go back to playing with my cousins, okay Abby?”

“Okay, sweetheart, go have fun,” I said with a smile, watching her run away from me back to the girls on the rug. She tucked her legs underneath her and went back to playing, as if she had never left the small circle.

“That went surprisingly well,” Joey said, taking the package out of my arms.

“Lance warned me this time,” I said. “He told me she's used to hearing that he can't do something because he has to work, so we thought it was our best bet to use that. My excuse last time was kind of lame.”

Joey shook his head at me. “No, I thought it was perfect. Give yourself some credit, even Lance and I didn't know what to say, and we're parents.”

I laughed. “All girls for both of you, huh?”

“We call it the 'boy band curse',” he said with a smile. “This is our punishment for warping the minds of millions of prepubescent girls.”

I looked away and smiled, blushing a little at the fact that at one point, I had been one of those girls who had the posters on my walls. I hadn't been a dedicated fan who knew all the details of their personal lives like a lot of their fans, but I had every one of their albums. It was something I hadn't even told Lance yet, because it left me a little embarrassed to admit it to him.

A woman came into the room, and Joey looked to her then towards me.

“Abby, this is my wife, Kelly.”

She smiled warmly and held out her hand to me.

“Hello, Abby,” she said. “I've heard a lot about you in the past couple weeks, I'm glad you could come for Bailey.”

I smiled and shook her hand in return. “I'm glad I could come, too. She's such a sweet little girl.”

She looked over at Joey, and then looked back to me.

“I'm only sorry we had to pull you out of work today.”

“Speaking of,” Joey said, “if you're here, what is Lance doing there?”

“I knew that without something to do he would sit in his cell and drive himself nuts.” I smiled. “So I asked my cousin John and Roberta to find little things for him to do during the day. They're both guards and they like him and try to keep him company on my days off, but today he needed to have something to occupy his mind so he wouldn't think about not being here.”

“You know, I'm glad you're looking out for him,” Joey said seriously as Kelly exited the room. “I'm out here and he's in there. I do what I can out here, but he needs someone in there.”

“I know it probably sounds insane, since I haven't known Lance long, but I care about him. And I care about Bailey, too.”

“Why would that sound insane to me?” he said, with a bemused look on his face.

“Well,” I responded, “I guess I'm used to people thinking that. They thought I was crazy when I decided to become a prison nurse, and now I'm involved with an inmate.”

Joey briefly looked over to where the girls were playing, and then motioned me to walk with him. I followed him into the kitchen, where Kelly was busy putting together snacks for the party.

“Lance isn't a bad guy,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

“Of course,” I said with a nod. “I knew that the moment I saw him. It's...my family, you know?”

Joey chuckled. “Yeah. I know.”

“Lance is a good guy,” Kelly said. “Really good. It's a shame what she did to him.”

I nodded in agreement. I looked over at Joey and saw him looking down at his feet, contemplating something. He looked like he was letting it eat away at him, a lot like Lance had looked the past few months.

“Can I help you with any of this stuff?” I said as I looked at Kelly. “You must have a lot to do.”

She smiled at me.

“Oh Abby, that would be great. Thank you.”

For the next few minutes I helped Kelly put together platters of cut fruit and vegetables, bags of party favors and candy, and helped her put the candles into Bailey's cake. As we took everything outside to the table, guests started arriving. Joey had disappeared from my sight after I got busy helping Kelly, but he reappeared to answer the door.

As the party got underway, I found myself more at ease than I had started. Bailey stuck by my side through most of the party, and Kelly kept looking over at us with a smile on her face.

After the party was over and everyone left, the girls all collapsed on the living room floor in a cake frosting and vanilla ice cream coma. Joey sat on the couch, “just to rest a minute,” and ended up falling asleep a few minutes later. Kelly and I started picking up all the dishes to take them to the kitchen.

“It's a sad sight, isn't it?” Kelly said with a smile as she looked at Joey on the couch. “He does this all the time. I'm lucky if he's alert five minutes after the girls are all in bed.”

I chuckled.

“Must be hell to be old before your time,” I said. “I'm lucky that I can create enough work for Lance to do to keep him awake ten minutes at a time in the office.”

“You care about him a lot, don't you?” she asked as we walked over to the sink.

She put the dishes in the sink and I dipped a plate under the water and started mindlessly washing.

“I don't know exactly how I feel right now, Kelly. I'm so confused.”

“I'm not. You feel exactly how Brayden never felt for him.”

“Well, that doesn't tell me much – I've never even been in the same room with her.”

She sighed.

“Would you like some coffee or tea or something?” she asked.

I smiled. “Coffee would be great, thanks.”

She brewed a pot of coffee while I washed a few of the dishes from the party. When the dish strainer was full, she urged me to sit at the table, setting a cup of coffee in front of me.

“I met Brayden a couple months after she got pregnant,” she said, sitting down in the chair in front of me. “We had a few friends over and they showed up. Joey had met her before then and I got the impression he didn't like her much. I didn't understand why until I met her myself. She was too showy, always had to have designer clothes and shoes and handbags. I'm not like that but she was a model. I thought we were just...different, you know?”

I nodded.

“Truthfully, I never liked her much either. I always thought there was something about her that she was hiding. Joey felt the same way. She treated Lance like crap. He never was good enough for her. It didn't seem to bother Lance much, but it killed Joey.”

“They must be close,” I said.

“Oh yeah, they are. It hurts Joey so bad. He feels like he should be able to do more to help Lance. Sometimes he acts like he's ready to burst through those prison doors and bust Lance out – like they'd ever get away with it. They can't even stay awake much past nine o'clock anymore; they'd fall asleep at the wheel of the getaway car.”

I laughed and took a sip of my coffee.

“And poor Lance – he feels things more than your average guy does. Most guys don't have feelings like us girls do. But Lance does. I wouldn't call him sensitive, but he's more so than any of the other guys. Bray hurt him so bad, and she doesn't even care.”

“She sounds like a nightmare.”

“I tried to stay away from her. Lance brought Bailey over without Bray because he knew I didn't get along with her much, so I didn't see her again until Bailey was about a year old. Joey and I went to have dinner at their house, mostly because Lance begged us to. Imagine my shock when I walked in to see Bray wearing flip-flops, cooking at the stove, with Bailey sitting there at her feet playing.”

“But that's not Brayden now,” I said.

“It wasn't long after that that Joey and I found out that she'd been going out with some new friends. Lance had never met these people and she wasn't coming home until ungodly hours in the morning. When we asked how long it had been going on, he told us a couple of months and brushed it off. Joey told him that Bray was up to something and whatever it was, it wasn't good, but Lance wouldn't listen. After a while, Joey stopped saying anything. He was too afraid it would ruin their friendship.”

“You had to have said something though, right?”

“Honey,” she said with a laugh, “Lance and I are good friends, but I'm not his best friend. If he wouldn't listen to it from his best friend, there was no chance that I could manage to get through to him.”

“I guess you're right,” I said with a sigh.

“Now Bray's trying to paint this picture of Lance and make it seem like he was the bad guy in their relationship. He put too much pressure on her to be a good mom and wife-material, and it got to be too much and that's why she turned to drugs. That's what she thinks Joey's done to me.”

“And that's not what he's done at all.”

She chuckled. “Far from it. I'm not perfect, and Joey can't make me perfect. If you weren't here those dishes would have sat in the sink for three days waiting for me. I don't trust anybody who does their dishes the same day they eat off them. It's not natural.”

I laughed and took another drink.

“The sad thing is that Lance never wanted to change her. He loved Brayden exactly how she was in the beginning. That woman was mean, manipulative, and self-centered – but he loved her, he had a daughter with her, and all he wanted was his old Bray back.”

It raised up a question in my mind that I had been contemplating for months.

“Do you think he still wants her back?”

She paused. “Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?”

I looked away from her, feeling that I already had my answer. I knew she could tell that I was disheartened.

“She's the mother of his child. She'll always have to be a part of his life in some way. I don't think you have to worry about him wanting her back. If he didn't care about you, I don't think he'd be giving you a second glance. I think she's scorned him enough that he wants to keep his distance from her. But you have to understand that she probably won't disappear.”

“I know,” I said with a nod. “He comes with baggage. Maybe I am crazy, because I don't care. I love him and I love that little girl in there.”

“I haven't ever seen Bailey open up to someone like she has with you,” she said. “It's amazing. She only met you one time three weeks ago and in three weeks, she's talked more about you than she has her own mom.”

I could tell that she saw my surprised look.

“Brayden didn't do Bailey any favors in her life. There are only a few people she trusts – her dad, Joey, me, and now you. You made some kind of impact on her. Children are pretty good at judging character.”

She went silent as I tried to take in our whole conversation.

“You know,” she said after a while, “I also don't trust parents who don't pilfer the leftover birthday cake after the kids have passed out from the sugar high.” She smirked at me from across the table. “What do you say?”

I smiled. “You're right. It's completely unnatural.”

She immediately stood up and grabbed two plates out of the rack of dishes.

“Abby, we're going to get along perfectly.”

Chapter 15

“This is so wrong, Abby.”

She smiled, her lips pressed up nearly against mine.

“Shut up,” she breathed against my mouth.

I smiled. “Someone could walk in that door any minute and catch us.”

“You're really bad at your whole criminal persona, you know,” she said. “We've managed to go a whole two months without anybody catching us.”

“Stealing a peck on the lips at the desk every now and then when we know no one is watching – it's a little different than me having you pinned up against the file cabinet.” I laced my fingers through hers, feeling the cool metal of the cabinet on the tips of my fingers. “It's a shame that there's all these handcuffs around, and I can't get my hands on a pair.”

“Yeah?” She smiled again coyly. “I'm sure my cousin would let me borrow his, especially if he thinks you're being unruly.”

“I'll have to brush up my criminal persona, I guess.”

She brushed her lips against mine briefly, but ducked out from beneath my grasp.

“You can have it your way, criminal,” she said, looking back at me while she walked away. Before she turned her head, I swore I saw her grin.

I groaned and leaned my head up against the cabinet, where my hands were still pressed.

“Not fair, Abby.”

She turned around and looked at me again with that grin.

“Life's not fair,” she said as she leaned against her counter. “Now get back to work, slacker.”

I sighed, feeling frustrated at the lack of power I had in situations such as this. I turned and looked at her. She had her back turned toward me, working on something at her counter.

“One thing before I get back to work,” I said as I started walking to her.

“And what's that?” she asked without turning around.

I grabbed her wrist and turned her to face me, and before she could protest I picked her up and sat her on top of the counter, connecting my lips with hers.

“I had to remind you that I love you.”

She looked me in the eyes for a few seconds, in complete shock, before I pulled away and started walking back towards my desk.

“Nice power play,” she said as she jumped off the counter. “I was right – you do feel the need to take women by surprise and sweep them off their feet.”

“Only when they torment me first,” I said with a laugh as I sat down in my chair. “I can't take four more months of that.”

In reality, if that was all I could get for the next four months of my sentence, I could live with it. The first week had been uncomfortable for both of us. It took a few days for Abby and I to find our comfort zone with each other. Once we found a balance in whatever this relationship was, there was nothing uncomfortable about it. I felt great; the best I had in years.

It was a weird relationship, definitely one of the weirdest I had ever been in. I had become aware of what Damian had talked about, and now had to watch how I looked at Abby and what kind of affection I showed her in front of the guards. Most of them knew that we were close friends, but we both had to pretend that it was nothing more. A kiss or simple touch was out of the question unless we absolutely knew we were alone. We both had far too much to lose if we were caught.

The only person we didn't have to be so careful around was John. It was hard to believe that after so many months I hadn't known they were cousins. It was even harder to believe that when Abby told him every detail about our relationship, that he hadn't tried to kill me. In fact, he was incredibly cool about it.

The two of them were close; he and Abby had even been roommates while she was in nursing school and him in academy. I thought the fact that she told him everything as if they were brother and sister would hurt us, but it had been the opposite. He had been quite an ally of ours, from helping us keep things under wrap from the other guards to helping Abby tell her parents.

From what I heard, telling Abby's parents had been quite an adventure in itself.

“Is your dad still threatening to pull a shotgun on me?” I asked in amusement, as the lull in conversation in the room had made me think about it.

“No, he's coming around,” she said, then paused.

“I sense a 'but' coming.”

“But you might want to watch out for random BB's.” I raised my eyebrow at her. “I'm working on it,” she said. “I'm wearing him down.”

“I'll use John as a human shield. He won't mind.”

“That's a good idea,” she said with a laugh. “Speaking of dads...Bailey asked about you again yesterday.”

I sighed. Bailey had grown close to Abby in the past two months and every week Abby took her out to do something new. They loved spending time together – the only drawback was that it seemed like every week I heard how increasingly hard it had become for Bailey to accept my absence.

“I dodged it,” she said. “I'm running out of excuses though.”

She walked over to the table and grabbed an envelope of photos out of her bag.

“Her preschool put on an adorable play last night.” She grabbed the handful of photos out of the envelope and handed the top one to me. “Cutest bunny rabbit in New York, I think.”

I looked at the photo she had handed me – Abby was holding Bailey in her arms. She was wearing a headband with bunny ears, her nose and cheeks painted to look like a bunny. It seemed like even though it had only been three months since her visit here, she had grown so much in that time.

“I'm missing everything,” I said to Abby as I looked at the picture. “The night before I got arrested, she had the flu. I was running on so little sleep because of Bray already and then Bailey kept me up all night...I put her to bed watching Tangled because it's one of her favorite movies. She said she wanted to grow her hair out like the princess in the movie.”

Abby looked at me quietly.

“I told her by the time her hair grew that long she'd be too old to use it to sneak boys into her room. I know I only have four months to go, but it feels like by the time I get back to her, she will be sneaking boys into her room, Ab.”

“I'll tell Joey to cut her hair and install bars on her windows,” she said, smiling slightly. “He'll be on it like white on rice – no boys will be sneaking in on his time card.”

Even though seeing the picture made me sad, I laughed.

“We'll make up for it,” she said. “Four months and then we can make up for a whole year. The park has ice cream and cotton candy. We'll fill her full of the stuff and make her ride the merry-go-round so many times that she throws up all over the place. We'll take her to the zoo every day, so she gets sick of seeing the elephants and monkeys.” She grabbed the picture out of my hand and used a pin to stick it to the board above her desk. “Four months, Lance. Four months until she forgets that this ever happened.”

I looked up at the picture – she had placed it directly in my line of sight, so I would see it every time I sat at the desk.

“We'll make it through that – remember?”

It seemed like an eternity to have to wait four months, but I had already been here eight. Looking at the picture reminded me what I was going to walk out to.

The simple thought of it made me smile.

“Yeah,” I said to her. “We'll make it through that.”

She smiled back at me in satisfaction. It was the same smile she gave me every time she “won” against me and snapped me back into a good mood. She was good at it, in fact it was one of her specialties.

It was one of the things that I loved about her. It was only one of the many things, but it was one of the best.

As she walked away from me, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her back over to me. She spun and ended up in my lap with a strong laugh.

“You're keeping me from doing my work, you know,” she said as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

“What work? No one's here. No one's ever here.”

“There's still work to be done. People can get hurt here at anytime. And I'll remind you that I can't fix people who are hurt if my paperwork isn't being done.”

“Move in with me,” I said, ignoring her. “After I get out of here.”

She paused. “Lance, I can't do that.”

“Yes you can.”

“You have a family.”

“And it includes you,” I said. “I love you, my daughter adores you...”

Abby loved her independence. She took care of herself and she did it well, and it was something she prided herself on. She hated it when anybody else wanted to take care of her.

“I don't make a good 'kept' woman,” she said.

“I don't want to keep you. I want to borrow you and never give you back.”

She chuckled at me. “Isn't that the definition of keeping me?”

“Not if it's your choice to be kept.”

She looked at me with confusion in her eyes. I could tell that the proposition was torturous for her. Her independent side wanted to stay that way, not feel like it was giving up the freedom she was so attached to. Her other side told her she wasn't giving up anything.

“I'll think about it,” she finally said. “That's all I can give you right now.”

“That's good enough for me,” I said.

A clearing of the throat from the doorway took us by surprise and we moved apart quickly.

“I didn't see anything and I didn't hear anything,” John said as he peeked into the doorway, although I could tell by his facial expressions he was lying. “I have to learn to knock before I come in now.”

Abby smiled as I stood and tried to gather my composure.

“You have a phone call,” he said, looking at me. “It's apparently important. 'Life or death'.” He used air quotes and rolled his eyebrows in skepticism. Then he smiled. “Unless you're too busy here to take it.”

“No.” It worried me that he said it was so important. The only thing I could think of was that something happened to Bailey. “No, I'm good. I can take it.”

“Come with me, I'll take you down there.” He looked over at Abby in amusement. “You okay here, Abby? You'll be okay on your own without him?”

“I'm glad you think it's so funny, John,” she said sarcastically. “I'm fine – although I think I need a 'Do Not Disturb' sign.”

“Yeah, that wouldn't be hard to explain away to the warden at all,” he said as he closed the door behind me.

Once the door was closed, he turned to look at me.

“Sorry, man,” he said with a smirk. “You know I have to give you shit. But seriously, you guys might want to be a little more careful from now on.”

“Yeah,” I said, and sighed as we started walking off towards the phones.

“I think we need a code knock or something.”

I laughed.

“What, like knock three times when you're alone and knock four times when you're with someone else?”

“Make fun all you want, I think it's a good idea,” he said.

“You know, I didn't come in here a criminal, but you and Abby make me act like one more every day.”

As we got closer to the phones, I got more nervous that something was wrong with Bailey. I didn't get a lot of phone calls, only the occasional call from my mom or Joey. If they weren't calling because something was wrong, they wouldn't say it was “life or death”.

John led me over to the phone and I sighed as I picked it up and put it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Hi, baby,” the familiar voice said from the other end.

“Bray.”

I garnered attention from John, who was standing next to me. He was familiar with who she was and the games I had endured with her for so long.

“How are you?” she asked in a sweet tone.

“Well, I was better before I picked up the phone.”

“Lance...”

“What the hell do you want?” I asked her. “I don't have the patience for you today, Bray.”

I waited a few moments for a response; I heard some noise in the background, what I thought might be the jangle of a bracelet she was wearing and a couple people in the room talking.

“I'm in trouble, baby.”

“Don't call me baby,” I warned. “I'm not your baby, Bray.” I lowered my voice to barely above a whisper. “I have a girlfriend. That's my baby, not you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw John smile. It took her a few moments to talk again.

“I'm in trouble,” she repeated.

“What's new?” I said with a scoff. “And why is this my problem anyway?”

“It's Jason,” she said.

“And I care why? What'd he do, break up with you like you broke up with me? Screw you over like you screwed me over?”

I couldn't hide my anger towards her, even though she sounded truly upset.

“Lance, he hit me.”

As angry as I was, I softened my tone of voice.

“What do you mean, he 'hit' you?”

“He lost the job that his uncle gave him.” From her voice, I could tell she had been crying. “He ran out of money and he couldn't afford drugs. His friend took him to the bar and he came home drunk last night. He wanted me to give him some of my jewelry that you gave me so he could pawn them to get high. When I wouldn't give them to him, he accused me of still loving you. He got so mad...and he hit me.”

“Did you go to the hospital? Or the police?”

I heard another muffled breath come from her.

“He'll hurt me if I do. I waited until he went out this morning and I left. But I don't have any money or clothes, or anywhere to stay. My mom is on vacation; I don't know where to go. I don't have any money for a hotel. I have to leave California, I'm afraid he'll find me and try to kill me.”

“How long has this been happening?” I asked.

“A couple months. He only hits me when he can't get high, but since he hasn't had a job he's been doing it a lot more often.”

I sighed and pinched my forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

“And what do you want me to do it about it, Bray? I'm in prison – which you should remember, since you put me here.”

“I just need some help,” she said with a sniffle.

“What do you need?”

“Money,” she responded. “I can go stay with my aunt in Canada if I have money to rent a car and a hotel room for the night. Maybe I could buy some clothes and food, too.”

I couldn't help but wonder if she was lying to me. She had lied to me before, obviously. I wanted to think that she wasn't the kind of person who would lie to me about being hit by Jason, but with her past I couldn't be sure. Still, she was the mother of my child and it was unspoken that nobody hurt her. If she was telling the truth, I couldn't pretend like it wasn't happening.

“So you want me to give you money to get out of California?” I asked.

“Please, Lance,” she begged. “I need you right now.”

I caught John looking at me and immediately thought about Abby. I couldn't start playing a back-and-forth game between her and Brayden. But I couldn't let Bailey lose her mother if she was telling the truth.

“Take what you need,” I said with a sigh, cursing my soft side. “There's still money in the joint account. I never got a chance to close it before I came here. It should be enough for you to rent a car and hotel and get a few things you'll need. If you need more...” I hesitated. “...my extra debit card is on the dresser at home. Only take what you need, Bray. Don't bleed me dry.”

“I know.”

“When you get to Canada, you need to find other arrangements.”

“I know, Lance,” she insisted.

“You need to go to the police, Bray – before you leave California.”

“I can't,” she said quietly.

“Brayden,” I said insistently. “If he hurts you, he could hurt Bailey.”

I heard her sigh deeply.

“You have a girlfriend, then,” she said, suddenly changing the subject.

“Yeah. I do.”

“I thought you loved me,” she said. Her voice was still sad, but in a different way.

“People change, Bray. Feelings change.”

She didn't say anything for a while. It had been the first time I had talked to her since she had visited me. I couldn't understand why she was surprised, but I had told her then that I still loved her and had even tried to mend things with her. It was probably a shock to her.

“I better get on the road,” she said after a long pause.

“Please go to the police. And be careful – don't go back to him.”

“I'm sorry, Lance,” she said, barely above a whisper.

I didn't want to think about the fact that she had screwed up my life and I was still caving in for her.

“Just be careful, Brayden. I have to go.”

I hung up the phone, and John looked at me quizzically.

“Problems?” he asked.

I sighed. “You have no idea.”