~Amelia~
By the time I got to Gregory's cell, I had already rehearsed ten different versions of what I was going to say to him.
None of them were kind. None of them were supposed to be.
Kaden walked beside me the whole way down. Caleb followed just behind. The guard unlocked the outer gate and stepped aside without a word.
Gregory was sitting on the bench inside his cell when I stopped in front of the bars.
He looked at me the way a man looks at someone who has shown up at an inconvenient time, like I had interrupted something important rather than walked into the consequences he had spent years running from.
Prison had taken the polish off him. The expensive clothes were gone, the groomed authority was worn down, but the rot underneath was exactly where I had left it. He still carried himself like a man who believed the room he was in had made a mistake by existing around him.
I stared at him and thought about my mother.
