PART 2: Twenty-Six Nights
"Where did you send them, Eli?" He pointed at his closet. "On your old phone. I hid it in your hoodie so Troy wouldn’t find it. I typed them to Dad like you showed me. But they always turn red."
I understood right away. That phone had no SIM card. It could only send anything over Wi-Fi, and Eli told me Troy had changed the Wi-Fi password in his first week so only he and his boys could get online. Every message my son had written was still sitting there, undelivered, with a tiny red exclamation point beside it.
I wanted to read them that second. But Eli was already fading, his head heavy against my chest. He’d been holding himself together for so long that the moment I walked in, his body simply gave out. I laid him down and pulled the blanket up, and he grabbed my wrist. "Don’t leave," he mumbled. "I’m not leaving," I said. He was asleep before I finished the sentence.
Shannon came home at 2:10 in the morning. I heard her heels on the porch, the jingle of keys, a laugh that cut off when she saw my truck. She walked in smelling of cigarettes and the stale, cold air of a casino floor. Her eyes went wide. "Cole! You’re early." "Storm," I said. "Why is our son’s arm covered in duct tape?"
She didn’t even blink. "He touched a hot pan. Kids do stuff like that. We were out of gauze, so I taped it so he wouldn’t pick at it. It’s fine." "Duct tape, Shannon?" "Don’t start." She dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and kicked off her shoes. "You show up once a month and suddenly you want to play inspector. I’m the one doing this alone. You don’t get to walk in here and judge me."
"Why is Troy living in my house?" "He’s not living here. He’s helping. He watches Eli when I need a break. Something you’d know about if you were ever around." She went upstairs and shut our bedroom door. In the living room, Troy had already drifted back to sleep in my recliner, snoring with his mouth hanging open, as if none of this had anything to do with him.
I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. Around three in the morning I slipped back into Eli’s room and opened his closet as quietly as I could. My old gray hoodie was balled up in the back corner behind his sneakers. Inside the front pocket, wrapped in a sock, was the phone.
The battery was at four percent. I grabbed a charger from my truck, plugged it in, and sat down right there on the closet floor. I opened the messages. One thread. Contact name: DAD. A long column of blue bubbles, every one with a red exclamation point beside it. Not Delivered. Not Delivered. Not Delivered.
The last one was from that afternoon. Day 26. Dad, Troy pushed my arm on the stove because the noodles burned. A man came and taped a paper on our door. Mom cried. Troy said the bank is taking our house and it’s your fault for not sending more money. Mom said I can’t tell you because then you will know where the money went. Please come home. I’m not ok.
I read it four times. Then I sat there on the closet floor and cried for the first time since my father’s funeral.
He’d been writing to me every night. To a phone that couldn’t send anything. Twenty-six nights of telling me the truth, while I was on the other end of a FaceTime call hearing, "He’s fine, he’s asleep."
I wiped my face with my sleeve and scrolled back through the drafts.
Day 9. Troy’s boys took my lizard. They said it ran away.
Day 14. I slept in the shed. It was dark. I counted to 1,000.
Day 19. Mom said if I tell you anything you will stop sending money and we will lose the house.
Day 22. I miss you. I put your hoodie on my pillow.
Spike was gone. My son had slept in a shed in the dark. And someone had taught him that telling his own father the truth would cost him his home. I took screenshots of every single message and emailed them to myself. Then I sent them to my work account too, just in case.
Then I remembered the line about the paper on the door. I crept downstairs in my socks. The house was dark except for the blue glow of the TV. Troy was still snoring. Shannon’s purse sat on the kitchen counter where she’d dropped it, unzipped, with a folded sheet of paper poking out the top.
I slid it out and unfolded it under the light over the stove. And the moment I read the first line, my hands started to shake.
