Chapter 1 - The First Breath of Scorched Air
The iron gates groaned with a sound that seemed to echo from the depths of my own hollowed chest.
For three years,
that sound had been the punctuation mark to every day of my existence.
I stepped forward,
and the gravel crunched beneath my worn shoes,
sounding like the breaking of fragile bones.
The air outside was different than the air behind the walls.
It didn't taste like bleach,
or damp concrete,
or the stagnant sweat of a thousand desperate women.
It tasted like March.
It tasted like cold rain,
and the distant,
faint scent of gasoline from the highway.
I looked up at the sky.
It was a bruised shade of violet,
the kind of color that looks like a healing wound.
Then I saw him.
He stood across the narrow road,
a silhouette against the gray morning.
Julian Vance.
He was the only person who had written to me every single week.
He was the man I had once considered a rival in the cutthroat world of Boston real estate.
Now,
he was the only person holding a piece of my former life.
In his hands,
he held a bouquet of sunflowers.
They were bright,
jarringly yellow,
looking like fallen stars in this bleak landscape.
His eyes were red,
rimmed with a fatigue that mirrored my own.
“Evelyn,”
he said hoarsely.
His voice was a low vibration that seemed to settle in my marrow.
“I’ve waited a long time.”
I didn't move at first.
I had forgotten how to be a person who receives gifts.
In prison,
everything is taken.
Nothing is given.
“Julian,”
I whispered,
my voice cracking like dry parchment.
“Why are you here?”
He stepped forward,
the sunflowers trembling slightly in his grip.
“Because the world tried to bury you,”
he replied,
his gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that made me want to flinch.
“And I’m the only one who knows where they put the body.”
He held the flowers toward me.
“Come home with me.”
Home.
The word felt like a foreign language.
My home was a crime scene.
My home was a place where my husband’s scent mingled with my best friend’s perfume.
My home was a place where I had swung a bat until my knuckles bled.
“I don’t have a home,
Julian,”
I said,
ignoring the flowers for a moment.
“I have a record.”
“I have a reputation as a madwoman.”
“And I have three years of missing time.”
He didn't flinch.
He didn't look away.
“You have me,”
he said.
“And you have the names of every person who cheered when you fell.”
I looked at the sunflowers.
They were symbols of loyalty.
They were flowers that followed the sun.
But I was a creature of the dark now.
I reached out,
my fingers touching the cold,
waxy stems.
“Take me somewhere where the walls don’t talk,”
I told him.
He nodded,
opening the door to a black sedan that looked like a sleek predator waiting in the shadows.
As we pulled away from the prison,
I didn't look back.
I looked at my hands.
They were rough.
The manicured nails of Evelyn Lane,
the CEO,
were gone.
These were the hands of a woman who had survived.
And as the engine hummed,
I realized that the fire Michael and Rachel thought they had extinguished had only been smoldering.
Now,
May you like
with the wind of freedom,
it was starting to breathe again.
