By the third week, she had stopped waking in a panic every single time someone’s footsteps paused outside her cell. It still happened often enough to leave her pulse thudding and her sheets damp, but her body was slowly and reluctantly beginning to understand. Not every sound in the night meant danger was standing on the other side of the door.
Some nights, though, memory ignored reason entirely. On those nights, she dreamed of the kitchen.
Not always the shooting itself. Sometimes the dreams were crueler than that. Sometimes Andrew was still alive and standing at the counter with his sleeves rolled up, slicing lemons for drinks or flipping through the mail or leaning against the sink with that easy smile that used to make her heart race for all the wrong reasons.
In the dreams, she alw
