CHAPTER 22 SHAWN—ALONE
The cell doesn't feel bigger without him. Feels smaller. Every inch of it still shaped around two people instead of one, and Shawn keeps catching himself leaving room on the bunk that doesn't need leaving anymore.
New cellmate comes in two days later. Older guy, quiet, keeps to himself in a way that isn't unfriendly, just closed. Shawn doesn't try the way he tried with Jorge. Doesn't have it in him this time, and doesn't especially want to find out if he does.
Commissary still comes Thursdays. Shawn's got money on his books now, doesn't need anybody's ramen handed over the six feet between bunks, and somehow that just makes it worse instead of better. Buys his own bag, eats alone, tastes nothing.
The library cart still rattles down the tier twice a week. Shawn checks it out of habit more than hope, flips through whatever's there, and one afternoon finds another car magazine wedged between a western and something religious.
Doesn't take it.
Leaves it right there for somebody else, because taking it home to a top bunk with nobody underneath it to argue about Regals and Impalas feels like a joke with no punchline worth reaching for.
The sketches are still under his mattress.
Reservoir, dump, switch panel, two different handwritings crowding the same scrap of paper.
Shawn pulls it out some nights, traces the lines Jorge drew slow and careful, and tells himself he's studying instead of just missing somebody hard enough that it sits behind his ribs like a stone he can't cough up.
"Delgado send word yet?" the new cellmate asks once, not unkindly, just making conversation.
"No visits. No calls yet." Shawn doesn't look up from the sketch. "Takes time getting resettled, probably. Shop's been sitting empty a while."
"You two close?"
"Yeah." Shawn folds the paper, careful, corners squared the way he learned watching somebody else do it a hundred times. "Yeah, we were close."
He doesn't correct the past tense out loud. Doesn't know yet if it's the right tense or the wrong one, and some nights that not-knowing is worse than anything the DA's ever threatened him with.
His own court date's closing in now, weeks instead of months, and every calculation he'd been avoiding comes crashing back in without Jorge there to talk him down from the twenty-year math.
Twenty years. Still on the table, still real, still the number some prosecutor's going to lead with whether or not Shawn's got anybody left in this cell to hold his hand through hearing it.
The shop idea sits differently now too. Used to be a plan two people built together, sketched out over commissary forms and stolen midnight hours. Now it's just a maybe, hanging out somewhere past a verdict Shawn's not sure is going to let him reach it.
"What if I don't get out," Shawn says out loud one night, to nobody, to the ceiling, same three tiles he's counted since the day he transferred in.
Nobody answers. Nobody's supposed to. Jorge's not six feet away anymore with something steady and low to say back, and Shawn's finding out fast how much of his own courage he'd been borrowing from somebody else's certainty.
He picks the sketch back up. Traces the switch panel one more time, the way Jorge taught him, respect the pressure, every time, no exceptions, and tries to hold onto that like it means something bigger than hydraulics.
Maybe it does. Jorge said maybe it did.
Shawn folds the paper away and lies back, staring at the ceiling, doing the math he can't stop doing now that there's nobody left in the room to tell him to quit it.
Twenty years is still on the table.
So is a shop with his name half-written into the plans for it, if he can just find a way to reach the other side of a verdict that doesn't care what either of them are hoping for.