Chapter 40 Knox
KNOX
The buzzer sounded. Metal scraped against concrete. And my entire world tilted on its axis.
Because sitting at the table in the center of the visiting room wasn’t Ryker. Wasn’t Axel.
It was her.
Gwendolyn.
Even after ten years, I knew her instantly.
The same light-brown hair with sun-kissed highlights that used to bounce in pigtails now fell in loose waves around her face.
And those eyes. Lord, those eyes. The same warm brown I used to stare into while rocking her to sleep, singing off-key lullabies until her tiny fingers stopped gripping my shirt.
My boots felt welded to the floor.
Fourteen years of prison had turned me into something carved from stone. I’d faced down men twice my size without flinching. Took a shiv to the ribs and didn’t make a sound. But this? This eighteen-year-old girl with her mother’s chin and my stubborn jaw?
She unmade me.
In my head, she’d been frozen at the age I’d last seen her: Eight years old. Gap-toothed smile. Tiny hands reaching for mine. But this woman sitting before me had lived an entire decade without me. Graduated. Dated. Cried. Laughed. Grew up.
And I hadn’t been there for any of it.
I forced my legs to move. One step. Then another. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the room smelled like industrial cleaner and burnt coffee. Stale. Lifeless. No place for someone like her.
Her gaze flicked to my face, and I watched her catalog the damage. The swollen eye. The split in my lip.
She winced. Just barely. Then smoothed her expression into something carefully neutral.
“Gwendolyn,” I said.
“Gwen.” The correction was quiet. Tired. A wall wrapped in one syllable.
I absorbed the hit. Sat down across from her. Let the silence stretch while I studied this stranger who shared my blood. She had her arms folded across her chest, spine pressed against the back of her chair like she was trying to put as much distance between us as physically possible.
“I appreciate you coming to see me.”
She studied me for a long moment. Not with hatred. With something worse.
Curiosity. Like I was a stranger she was trying to place.
The thing about prison was, it gave you plenty of time to think.
To fantasize. I’d spent countless nights imagining this moment.
Her running into my arms. Sunday dinners.
Birthday parties. Photo albums spread across a kitchen table while she walked me through every moment I’d missed.
I’d imagined her voice. Her laugh. The way she might look at me like I still mattered.
Naive. Childish. The dreams of a man desperate enough to believe he hadn’t already lost everything.
Reality, as it turned out, didn’t give a damn about my fantasies.
“So?” Gwen’s voice cut through my thoughts. “You said you wanted to see me. I’m here.”
I scrubbed a hand over my stubbled jaw. Truthfully, my best-case scenario with sending that email was that she might email me back. Letting myself hope she might actually want to come here, to see me in person, was too much to bear. And now that she was here, words seemed to fail me.
So, I started with something smaller, something that wouldn’t put too much stress on her. “I wanted to know how you’re doing. How your life is going.”
“You wanted to know.” She repeated the words slowly, like she was testing their weight. “After ten years of silence.”
“Gwen …”
“I’m not trying to fight with you.” Her voice wavered, just slightly. “I just … I need to understand something first.”
I waited.
“Why?” The word came out fractured. “Why didn’t you call? Or write? I waited, you know. Every birthday. Every Christmas. I’d check the mailbox like it was some kind of ritual.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Mom finally told me to stop. Said you’d moved on.”
The lie hit me like a fist to the chest. Moved on. Like I hadn’t spent every single day in this hellhole thinking about her. Like I hadn’t begged her mother for updates, for photos, for anything.
Like I hadn’t been told, over and over, that a clean break was best. That my voice would only confuse her. That she was finally adjusting and I’d ruin it if I reached out.
I’d believed it. God help me, I’d believed it because believing it was easier than fighting a war I couldn’t win from behind bars.
“Your mother thought …” I started, then stopped. What was the point? Blaming her mother wouldn’t give Gwen her childhood back. Wouldn’t undo the damage.
“Mom thought what?”
I pressed my tongue against my molars. “She thought you needed stability. A fresh start. And I …” The words tasted like ash. “I let her make that call.”
Gwen’s brow furrowed. “You let her? You’re telling me you wanted to be in my life, but you just … didn’t fight for it?”
“I fought.” My voice came out rougher than I intended. “At first, I fought. But I was in here, and she was out there, raising you.”
She huffed, offended. “You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth.”
“You expect me to believe you over my mother? The woman who was here for me every single day of my life while you weren’t?”
I swallowed. I wanted to ask her what, exactly, my ex had said, but there was no point in starting a fight.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I replied. “And your mom was right; I’d forfeited my right to make decisions about your life the moment I chose to …” I stopped.
“Chose to what?” Gwen leaned forward. “Kill someone?”
The word hung between us like smoke.
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment. Processing. Like she debated changing the subject, but something told me based on her body language that this was a question she’d lost sleep over. “So, why did you do it?”
There it was. The question she’d been building toward. Perhaps the only reason she’d been willing to come see me today.
“Gwen …”
“I’m serious.” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat.
Tried again. “I’ve spent years trying to understand.
Mom won’t talk about it. The internet just has news articles that don’t tell me anything meaningful.
And I’ve built you up into this … this monster in my head because that’s easier than wondering. ”
She looked down at her hands. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper.
“You were supposed to be my dad.” Supposed to be. “In your email, you talked about the wonderful memories you had of our time together. But if that was true, then WHY did you throw it all away?”
“Why did you throw it all away?”
“I know it wasn’t self-defense,” she continued.
“If it was, you wouldn’t be in here. You wouldn’t have pled guilty.
So, whatever that man did … whatever reason you had …
” She looked up at me, and I saw it then.
The little girl who used to crawl into my lap during thunderstorms. The one who believed her daddy could fix anything.
“What could possibly be worth this? Worth missing my whole life?”
Harper’s similar words echoed in my head.
The words sat on my tongue. Heavy. Poisonous.
I could tell her. Right now. I could explain that the man I killed was a predator who had been watching her for months.
That the police had found evidence on his computer that made seasoned detectives vomit.
That I had spent fourteen years researching what happens to children who learn they were victims of something unspeakable, and some articles said the knowledge itself could become a wound that never fully heals.
I could tell her, and she might understand.
She might forgive me.
I might get my daughter back.
But at what cost?
She would spend the rest of her life knowing. Wondering. Replaying every childhood memory and searching for signs. The nightmares she’d have. The paranoia. The way she’d flinch when men looked at her too long, not because of experience, but because of possibility.
I had already taken her father from her.
I would not take her peace of mind too.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said quietly.
Her face crumpled. Just for a second. Then the walls went back up, and hurt hardened into something sharper.
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Both.”
“That’s not good enough.” Her voice rose. “You owe me an explanation. You owe me something.”
“I know.” I met her eyes. Held them. “But there are things you’re better off not knowing. And I won’t do that to you.”
“You won’t do that to me?” She laughed incredulously. “Do you hear yourself? You’ve already done everything to me. You weren’t there for the father-daughter dance in fifth grade. I sat at a table alone with a cup of punch while every other girl waltzed with her dad.”
Something cracked in my chest. The kind of fracture that spreads slowly, splits you open from the inside.
“You weren’t there when I hit my first triple in softball. Weren’t there when I won first place at the track meet. Weren’t there when I walked across the stage at graduation and looked into the crowd and saw an empty seat where you should have been.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, welcoming the pain.
“Someone found out about you in middle school. Looked you up. Told everyone my daddy was in prison for killing someone.” Her voice trembled. “I didn’t have a single friend for two years. Two years of eating lunch alone. Two years of whispers. And you weren’t there to tell me it would be okay.”
I couldn’t speak. My throat had closed up. My daughter, alone. Twelve years old. Eating lunch by herself in a cafeteria full of whispers. And I wasn’t there to protect her from any of it.
I’d killed a man to keep her safe, and she’d been drowning anyway.
“I’ve spent years in therapy trying to learn how to trust people.
Trying to unlearn the lesson you taught me.
” A single tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away angrily.
“You want to know what that lesson was? That people leave. That love isn’t enough.
That the people who are supposed to protect you will choose something else over you every single time. ”
The words landed like bullets. Each one finding a vital organ.
I’d dreamed of this reunion for years. Prayed for it. Bargained with God for it. And now she was here, telling me I’d ruined her. That my absence had shaped her into someone who expected to be left. Who braced for abandonment the way other people braced for storms.
I had told myself that I was protecting her. That my absence was a gift. That she was better off not knowing, not visiting, not being tethered to a monster in a cage.
I was wrong.
The damage I thought I’d prevented? I’d caused it anyway. Just differently. Just slower. Just in ways I couldn’t see from behind these walls.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and the words felt pathetically inadequate. “I’m so sorry.”
“But not sorry enough to tell me the truth. Evidently, the only thing that mattered was killing that man. That, evidently, was more important than staying out of prison so you could actually be a father to me.”
Jesus Christ.
“So, when I ask you why and you tell me you can’t answer?” She stood up, chair scraping against the floor. “You’re just proving me right. You’re still choosing something else over me. Still keeping me on the outside.”
“Gwen, please …”
“Tell me why.” Her voice broke. “Just tell me. I’m not a child anymore. I can handle it.”
I looked at her. My daughter. This beautiful, broken woman who had survived things no child should have to survive. Who had become strong and fierce and so damn brave, even though every adult in her life had failed her.
Maybe she could handle the truth. But handling something and being unharmed by it were two different things.
“There are worse fates than growing up without a father,” I finally said.
Gwen stared at me. Seconds stretched. I watched her search my face for something, anything, that made sense. And I watched her come up empty.
“I came here hoping you’d finally be honest with me.” Her voice was hollow. Exhausted. “I thought maybe … maybe if I could just understand, I could stop being so angry. Stop feeling so lost.”
She turned toward the door.
“Gwen”—her name scraped out of me—“wait.”
She paused. Didn’t turn around.
I had one chance. One moment to say something, anything, that might keep the door open. That might give me another chance to earn back what I’d lost.
“The necklace,” I said. My hand went to the pendant beneath my shirt.
The one she’d made me out of some kind of metal beads and a leather cord she got when she was four.
The one I’d never taken off. The one that had survived shiv fights and showers and fourteen years of hell because removing it would have meant admitting she was gone.
“You asked me once if I’d wear it forever. Do you remember what I said?”
Her shoulders tensed.
“I said I’d wear it until the day I died.” My voice cracked. “I meant it.”
For a long moment, she didn’t move.
Then, without turning around: “That’s not enough, Knox.”
Knox.
Not Dad. Not even a sarcastic Father. Just Knox. Like I was some stranger she’d read about in a police report.
The buzzer sounded. The lock clicked. And I sat alone in that visiting room, surrounded by the ghosts of every choice I’d ever made.
And then she was gone. And this time, I couldn’t even tell myself it was for her own good.
I had saved my daughter from a monster.
But in her world, I’d become the only monster she could see.