but his wide brown face was impassive, and his eyes were staring straight ahead.
They approached a large, windowless building six stories tall: the prison. As they passed beneath its shadow, Hannah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Only the most violent felons were kept behind bars—first-degree murderers, serial rapists, abortionists and other offenders deemed incorrigible by the state. Most of them served life sentences. Once they went in, they almost never came out.
As they neared the gate, it began to move, sliding into the wall with a mechanical groan.
“You’re free to go,” the guard told Hannah. She paused on the threshold. “What’s the matter, pajarita, you afraid to leave the nest?”
Giving no indication that she’d heard him, she squared her shoulders and stepped through the opening, into the world.
She stood in a short driveway leading to a parking lot. She walked to the edge of the drive and scanned the lot, one hand shielding her eyes against the morning sun. There was no movement, no sign of her parents’ blue sedan. She fixed her eyes on the entrance, willing the car to appear, telling herself her father was just running late.
“Hey, gal.” The voice, a man’s, came from behind her. She turned and saw a small booth she hadn’t noticed to one side of the gate. A guard was leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest. “Guess your friend ain’t coming,” he said.
“It’s my father,” Hannah said. “And he’ll be here.”
“If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I’d be rich as an A-rab.” The guard was tall and skinny, with a smug, pimpled face and a protuberant Adam’s apple that bobbed convulsively when he swallowed. He looked like he was about sixteen, though Hannah knew he had to be at least twenty-one to work at a state prison.
She heard the sound of a vehicle. She spun and saw a car pulling into the lot, but it was silver, not blue. Her shoulders slumped. The car stopped, backed up and exited.
“Looks like somebody taken a wrong turn,” said the guard. Hannah glanced back at him, wondering if the irony was intended, then decided he was too stupid for that. “What you gonna do if your daddy don’t show, huh? Where you gonna go?”
“He’ll be here,” Hannah said, a little too emphatically.
“You could bunk with me for a while, if you ain’t got nowhere else to go. I got a real nice place. Plenty of room for two.” His mouth twisted in a half-smile. Hannah felt her skin prickle with aversion as his eyes slithered down her body and back up again. How many other women had he propositioned like this, and how many had been desperate enough to take him up on it? Deliberately, she turned her back on him.
“I’m just trying to be friendly,” said the guard. “I think you’ll find the world ain’t such a friendly place for a Chrome.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw him go back into the booth. She sat down on the curb to wait. She was chilly in her thin summer blouse and skirt, but she didn’t care. The fresh air was divine. She breathed it in and lifted her face to the sun. From its position, it had to be close to noon. Why was her father so late?
She’d been waiting for perhaps twenty minutes when a yellow van pulled into the lot and headed toward the gate, stopping right in front of her. A sign painted on the door read: CRAWFORD TAXI SERVICE, WE’LL GITCHA THERE. The passenger-side window rolled down, and the driver, a middle-aged man with a greasy gray ponytail, leaned over and said, “You need a taxi?”
She stood up. “Maybe.” In Crawford, she could get something to eat and find a netlet to call her father. “How far’s town?”
“Fifteen minutes, give or take.”
“What’s the fare?”
“Well, let’s see now,” said the driver. “I reckon three hundred ought to just about cover it. Tip included.”
“That’s outrageous!”
He shrugged. “Ain’t many cabs’ll even pick up a Chrome.”
“See what I’m talking ’bout, gal?” drawled the guard from behind her. “It’s a tough ole world out there for a Red.” He was standing in front of the booth now, grinning, and Hannah realized that he must have called the cab. He and his buddy the driver had no doubt played out this scenario many times, splitting their despicable proceeds after the fact.
“Well?” said the driver. “I ain’t got all day.”
How much money did she have left? There couldn’t be much; almost all her savings had gone to pay for the abortion. Her checking account had had maybe a thousand dollars in it when she was arrested, but there would have been automatic deductions for her bills. The three hundred dollars she’d gotten from the state of Texas could very well be all she had to her name.
“I’ll walk,” she said.
“Suit yourself.” He rolled up the window and pulled away.
“Changed your mind yet?” the guard said. He sauntered over to her. She tensed, but he merely handed her a scrap of paper. On it was scrawled a name, Billy Sikes, and a phone number. “That’s my number,” he said. “If I was you I’d hang on to it. You might decide you could use a friend one of these days.”
Hannah crumpled it in her fist and let it fall to the ground. “I’ve got enough friends.” She turned and started walking toward the road.
She was halfway to the entrance when a familiar blue sedan pulled in. She broke into a run. It stopped a few feet in front of her, and she saw her father behind the wheel, alone. She’d known better than to expect her mother or Becca, but still, their absence cut deep. For some time, neither he nor Hannah moved. They gazed at each other through the glass of the windshield, worlds apart. Her mouth was dry with fear. What if he couldn’t stand the sight of her? What if he was so repulsed he drove away and left her here? She’d lost so much already, she didn’t think she could bear to live without her father’s love. For the first time since she’d entered the Chrome ward, she prayed. Not to God, but to His Son, who knew what it was to be trapped, alone, inside mortal flesh; who’d once known the terror of being forsaken. Please, Jesus. Please don’t take my father from me.
The driver’s door swung open, and John Payne got out, keeping the door between himself and Hannah. She approached him slowly, carefully, like a bird she was afraid of startling into flight. When she was still a few feet away, she stopped, uncertain. Her father stared at her without speaking. Tears were streaming down his face.
“Daddy?”
His chest heaved and he let out a choked sob. The sound lacerated her. Only once, at her grandmother’s funeral, had Hannah ever seen her father cry. Her own eyes welled as he moved from behind the car door and held his arms out to her. She walked into them, felt them enfold her. She had never been more grateful for anything in her life than for this tenderness, this simple human warmth. She thought of the last few times she’d been touched: by the guard earlier, by the medic who’d strapped her down and injected her with the virus, by the bailiff in the courtroom, by the horrid police doctor. To be touched with love was a kind of miracle.
“My beautiful Hannah,” her father said, stroking her hair. “Oh, my sweet, beautiful girl.”
HE’D BROUGHT A cooler of food: turkey sandwiches, potato chips, an apple, a thermos of coffee. Plain fare, but after thirty days of nutribars, it tasted ambrosial. He was silent while she ate, his eyes fixed on the road. They were heading north on I-35, toward Dallas. Toward home. A tendril of hope unfurled in her mind. Maybe her mother had forgiven her, at least enough to let her move back in.
As if he were following her thoughts, her father said, “I can’t take you home. You know that, don’t you?”
The tendril turned brown, crumbled to powder. “I do now.”
“If you would just talk to us, Hannah. Just tell us—”
She