It’s been a wild thirteen years. Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming it all because it went by so damn fast—it feels like yesterday, honestly. I can’t believe my baby girl is twenty-one today.
The last time I saw her, she was eight. We were sitting in a booth at that tiny, boring diner on the edge of town, sharing a chocolate milkshake with two straws. She had whipped cream on her nose, and I was trying so hard to print every detail of her face into my memory because I knew, even then, that I was running out of time.
Now, thirteen years later, sitting in the back of a neon-lit bus with a fake passport in my pocket and blood drying on my cuff, all I can think about is whether she remembers the taste of that milkshake. Or if she just remembers me as a ghost. pressed against the cold glass of a Greyhound window, bleeding through a makeshift bandage.
The bus hummed, tires chewing through miles of wet asphalt in the pitch black.
Habit took over before my brain could stop it. I did a quick sweep of the aisle. Twelve passengers.
The teenager in row four sleeping against the window—harmless. > The old man three rows back with the oxygen tank—slow, not a threat. > The guy in the black hoodie, two rows ahead on the left. > My thumb instinctively traced the outline of the suppressed pistol tucked into the small of my back. Black-hoodie hadn't slept since Pittsburgh. He hadn't pulled out a phone, either. Every ten minutes, his eyes flickered to the overhead mirror, checking the aisle.
Is he a tail, or just another paranoid jitterbug running from his own mess?
I pulled my cap lower over my eyes, pulling my jacket tight around my ribs where the side-swipe from the alleyway was still throbbing. Thirteen years of running, dodging ghosts, and changing names—and all I wanted today was to pick up a phone, call her, and hear her say my name.
But in my line of work, a phone call isn't a gesture of love. It’s a death warrant.