Coming Home(169)

Her vision blurred and she felt as if she were going to pass out.

And then he was being led away from them, and Leah lurched forward in her seat, gripping the divider in front of her.

WAIT.

The word was thrashing around wildly in her head, but she couldn’t make her mouth say it. She needed to do something—to say something to him—to touch him one more time.

Just before Danny walked through the doors, he turned and looked in their direction. It was a split second, but in that moment, his eyes conveyed everything.

Love. Remorse. Reassurance. Bravery.

And then he turned, walking through the doorway with a cop on either side of him. The door swung closed behind them, and the sharp click resounded through the room, erasing all the other sounds swirling in her ears and leaving an unsettling silence behind it.

Catherine clutched at her, and Leah turned and wrapped her arms around the woman who had raised Danny.

As her frail, trembling hands gripped the sides of Leah’s blouse, a desperate, broken wail cut through the silence, and Leah couldn’t be sure if it was Catherine’s or hers.





It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Danny knew he should be overcome with excitement right now. He should be envisioning what it was going to be like to have Leah in front of him again. Leah wrapped in his arms, laughing as he buried his face in her hair. The lilting sound of her voice as she assured him she was okay. That everyone was okay.

That he was going to be okay.

But so much had happened since he’d last seen her in that courtroom, and he just couldn’t reconcile that fantasy with his reality anymore. That sort of daydream didn’t belong here. It seemed too far-fetched, too unrealistic.

And idealism was a childish indulgence in this place.

For the first ten days after his arrival, Danny hadn’t been able to speak to anyone on the outside. Upon entering the facility, he had been told he wouldn’t have access to the phone lines or computers until his inmate account was set up; they said it would be activated shortly, and he had believed them.

He should have realized then how disgustingly na?ve he was.

Apparently, a ten-day wait was something to be grateful for; there were guys who claimed to have waited twice that long for their accounts to be activated. But hearing that information didn’t provide Danny with any consolation. It only made him angrier.

Ten f*cking days.

Ten days to program someone’s name into a computer. Ten days of knowing the people he loved were panicking over not having heard from him. Ten days of the walls closing in by the hour.

An interminable wait, simply to prove he was at their mercy. That he was just a number now. That his suffering meant nothing to anyone in charge.

On the fifth day, his cellmate Troy had offered to call Danny’s family to let them know he was waiting on his account to be set up.

Danny hadn’t been allowed to go inside the call room, and the knowledge that Troy was a few feet away with Leah’s voice in his ear was almost more unbearable than the first five days put together. When Troy returned, he told Danny she had appreciated the call and promised she’d pass the message along.

He wanted to ask how she had sounded. If she’d been crying. If she’d asked any questions about him. If she’d seemed relieved, or sad, or angry. He wanted to ask Troy to repeat every single thing she had said to him verbatim so Danny could memorize it.

But instead he had nodded and went back to his cell.

Troy’s call home should have provided him with some level of relief, but the next five days were somehow more excruciating than the first. The need to connect with someone from home had become a living thing, twisting and churning and clawing at his insides until it could be sated.