Free The Perfect Letter by Chris Harrison

feelings.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  You did everything you set out to do. You really made it, kid, and I’m so proud of you. It was all worth it. I swear.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  You once asked me for one word, even if it was good-bye. Now you have it. The word is “love.” I’ll always love you.
    Â 
    â€”J.
    She slid down the wall with the letter in her hands, shaking so much she could hardly breathe, her eyes blurring with tears. The light in the cottage seemed to dim. I’ll always love you, he’d written. But it was too late. He was too late. He’d been too proud, taken too long. She’d made a new life for herself. He couldn’t undo everything she’d spent the last ten years building. Some mistakes can’t be unmade, Jake, no matter how hard you try. The dead can’t rise again, can they? The sentence can’t be commuted after it’s served. And we both served that sentence, no matter how hard you tried to protect me, Jake. We both got locked away all those years ago.
    She had left Texas behind, but it hadn’t left her. It was here, now, in this room, in her hands, and she knew immediately she would have to find him. She would have to find Jake and close the door on the past once and for all. She didn’t have a choice.
    Â 
    MAY 20, 2004
    Burnside County Jail
    Dear Leigh,
    Three days I’ve been here, three days of fear and violence. Three days of despair. I lie on a mattress of stones, waiting for sleep that never comes.
    I saw you today, even though you didn’t know it. I saw you in your blue dress, the one with the white polka dots, the one like a shower of meteors streaking across the sky. Your hair was tied up in a ponytail. The sun was shining on it, all that long dark hair. I wanted to reach up, pull the rubber band out, and let it fall through my hands like water. Bury my face in it and breathe deeply. Drown in it. I thought if I could touch you one more time, if I could feel your hands on me again just once, I could go back into the prison and stay behind bars the rest of my life. I would face the death penalty, if it meant I could touch you once more before I go.
    I didn’t know the last time I kissed you would be the last time.
    It was from the window in my cell I saw you. You parked your granddaddy’s white truck in the visitors’ lot. You came up the walk to the front door of the jail wearing your red lipstick, clutching your mama’s little white purse. A vision of how you’d look at forty, fifty—still beautiful, still brilliant and burning as a deep blue night. I wanted to freeze that picture, bring you to a standstill. I want to remember you like that.
    The guards came to tell me I had a visitor. I told them to send you away. I said I wouldn’t come out for anyone but Jesus.
    I stood at the window and watched you come out again. You were crying. You put your head in your hands, and my heart broke, because I knew I had done the one thing I swore I would never do: I had made you cry.
    I don’t dare let you see me here. I don’t dare speak to youbehind a glass window. If I see you, I know my resolve will break, and that’s the one thing I can’t let happen. My only comfort is knowing that I am sparing you everything I see around me. How can I look at you through a glass, lie to you, tell you I’m fine?
    I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. Down the hall from me there’s a crazy man screaming about bugs crawling on him. My clothes are filthy. I haven’t had a shower or slept or eaten a decent meal. My cellmate is a car thief who punched a cop. He snores all night. I can’t tell him to roll over—he’s already said if I talk to him he’ll stab me in my sleep. Violence in him like a sickness.
    I asked one of the guards if he could move me to a different cell, and he laughed. You