Free Snowflakes & Fire Escapes by J. M. Darhower

know. I stopped paying attention.
    He lets out a deep sigh. “Just a few more years, Grace, and I’ll be out of this mess. A few more years and we can start over as a family.”
    I don’t respond to that.
    I’ve faced reality.
    There’s no starting over for him and I.
    “Goodbye, Dad.”
    I pull the phone away from my ear and hit the button to end the call before holding it out to Holden. I drop the pen after he takes the phone, leaning back in the chair and running my hands down my face. “Please don’t ever do that to me again.”
    Holden pulls out the chair across from me and sits. He’s quiet for a moment, and I glance over, meeting his eyes, seeing the frown on his lips. He thought he was doing me a favor, that talking to someone I knew in that other world would pacify me, but hearing my father’s voice again only made these feelings worse.
    I haven’t seen the man in a year, yet he’s still controlling my life.
    I’ve never felt so smothered.
    “You wanted it to be somebody else on the phone, didn’t you?”
    I scoff. “What makes you say that?”
    Holden motions toward the manual I’d been doodling in. One glance at it gives me my answer. I’d absently scribbled Cody’s name more than once without thinking. Picking up the pen again, I quickly scratch out every instance of it, knowing there’s a rule against leaving shit like that around. There are ways, of course, of communicating with the past … these untraceable phone calls, letters hand delivered by Marshals that are burned after reading.
    But in my case, it wasn’t possible.
    I look around the kitchen, looking at everything except for Holden. We’ve had this conversation about Cody before, and I’m not in the mood to have it again. “Can I ask you something, inspector?”
    From the corner of my eye, I see him grimace. He hates being called that about as much as he hates being deemed a handler.
    ‘Just call me Holden,’ he’d insisted. ‘Not Inspector, not Marshal … just Holden.’
    Holden is his last name, technically. I didn’t even know that until I spotted it on some paperwork a few months back. United States Marshals Service Inspector Brian Holden .
    I’ve never called him Brian.
    He probably doesn’t even realize I know that’s his name.
    “You can ask me anything,” he says, tearing the manual away from me and tossing it across the room, onto the kitchen counter, when I start doodling in it again. “As long as you look at me when you do.”
    I stare at him, still clutching the pen, and defiantly start scribbling right on the top of the kitchen table. He doesn’t stop me, knowing he really can’t. The Marshals Service paid for this table, but it belongs to me . Holden wants to intervene, though. I can see his fingers twitching.
    “Have you ever lost a witness?”
    It’s kind of funny, I think, that I’m considered a witness , considering I haven’t witnessed a fucking thing. Unless the injustice of humanity counts …
    He hesitates. “Define ‘lost’.”
    “As in ‘died’,” I say. “Has anyone ever died on your watch?”
    “No.”
    “Never?”
    “Never,” he says. “No witness has ever died that followed the rules.”
    “And the ones that didn’t follow the rules? How many of them have died?”
    “About thirty.”
    Thirty.
    My father’s personal body count is higher than that.
    “Out of how many?”
    “There are about seventeen thousand people under protection.”
    That momentarily leaves me speechless.
    That’s a lot of people living lives that don’t belong to them. I wonder how many feel like me. I wonder how many leave because of it, how many risk death, risk becoming one of those unlucky thirty, just for the chance to be themselves again.
    “I know thirty doesn’t seem like a lot,” Holden continues. “But it’s thirty lives we tried to save … lives we would’ve saved, if they had just followed the rules. It’s a senseless death, and I pray to God there’s never a