Nicholas
My fingers stay locked around the edges of the book until the spine creaks. The room keeps moving around me—men laughing at something on another channel, the clack of dominoes, the scrape of chairs—but I am suddenly very far away from all of it. The air tastes metallic. My pulse is loud enough that it drowns out the television for several long seconds.
Aria is missing.
I feel the moment my stomach drops through the floor and keeps falling.
One of the older inmates...Rico, who’s doing fifteen for armed robbery..leans over from the next table.
“You know that kid?”
I don’t answer. I can’t make my throat work.
He shrugs and turns back to his cards.
I stand up slowly, legs unsteady, and walk out of the common room before anyone can ask me anything else.
The corridor is long a
