Page 47 of You, Only You

11.Lindsey

Ihadn't seen my father in fourteen months. I hadn't wanted to. But somewhere between the tracking app and the balcony and the 2 AM text messages about maturity, a question had started forming. Not a clean, articulated question. More like a splinter working its way to the surface. And the only person who could pull it out was a man in a federal prison two hours away.

Will had objected, of course. We'd argued over breakfast, his face doing that thing where the jaw locked and the eyebrows drew together, which I'd mentally categorized as "Concern Masquerading As Strategy."

"It's a two-hour drive each way. You're not fully healed. The security situation..."

"I need to do this." I'd cut him off, my voice quieter than his but just as final. "Alone."

He'd studied me for a long moment, those ice-blue eyes seeing more than I wanted them to. I could practically hear the gears turning. The threat assessments. The route calculations. The twelve different ways he was trying to figure out how to say "no" without technically saying "no."

"Take a security detail," he'd said finally. "They won't go inside, but they follow you there and back. Non-negotiable."

It was a compromise. We were getting better at those. Slowly. Like two people learning to dance who kept stepping on each other's feet but hadn't given up yet.

Now the prison rose from the flat landscape like a concrete warning, razor wire glittering in the morning sun, guard towers punctuating the perimeter, all of it designed to remind you that some mistakes couldn't be walked back from. I parked in the visitor lot, my hands unsteady on the wheel in a way that had nothing to do with my ribs and everything to do with the man inside.

The last time I'd been here, I'd lasted twenty minutes. He'd asked about my work, and I'd given him the sanitized version, and we'd both pretended the silence between us was comfortable, and then I'd said I had to go and driven home and cried in my apartment for an hour. Productive stuff.

This time I wasn't here for the polite version. I was here because I needed to understand something, and he was the only person alive who'd walked the specific road I was afraid of walking.

The processing was exactly as dehumanizing as I remembered: metal detectors, signed forms, surrendered belongings. The visiting room smelled like industrial cleaner losing a war against sadness. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Plastic chairs scraped against linoleum.

And then he was there.

Thomas Ashford shuffled in behind a guard, and my first thought was:He's shrunk.Not just thinner, physically smaller, as if the years inside had compressed him. His hair had gone from salt-and-pepper to mostly salt. New lines carved his face, deeper than grief, deeper than age.

He saw me and stopped. Just for a second, his eyes went wide, surprised, then something that looked almost like fear. Like he'd conjured me from guilt and couldn't believe I was real.

"Lindsey." He lowered himself into the chair across from me, the table between us scarred and institutional. His voice was softer than I remembered. Reedy. "You came."

"Obviously."

"You look..." He stopped, swallowed. "You look like your mother."

I flinched. He saw it and his face crumpled slightly, like he'd stepped on a crack he should have known was there.

"Don't," I said, sharper than I intended.

"Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."

"I know what you meant." I made myself take a breath. Unclench my jaw. He was trying. He was always trying, in that helpless, fumbling way of a man who'd blown up his own life and spent every day since picking through the rubble. "I didn't come to talk about Mom. I came because I need to ask you something. And you're going to hate it. And I need you to answer me honestly, not the version you've rehearsed for parole hearings."

He nodded slowly, his hands clasped on the table. I noticed his wedding ring was gone, just a pale stripe of skin where it used to be. I noticed it the way I noticed everything: automatically, clinically, and then the clinical part broke and I just saw my father's bare ring finger and it hurt.

"Okay," he said. "I'm listening."

I'd planned how to frame this. On the drive up, I'd rehearsed different openings, different levels of disclosure, different ways to get to the question without revealing too much about Will or the case. I had a strategy.

The strategy lasted about four seconds.

"I'm involved with someone," I said. "Professionally. And... personally. Both. At the same time. Which is messy, and I know that, and I'm not here for a lecture about it."

"Involved how?"

"He's a good man." The words came out more defensive than I intended. "I think. But he operates in gray areas. He breaks rules because he believes the system is broken, that it protects the wrong people and fails the ones who actually need help."

My father's expression shifted. He knew about gray areas. He'd built a career there before it all collapsed.