AFTER THE FALL

The gate clanged shut behind her with a metallic finality that echoed across the empty concrete. After fourteen years inside, the silence beyond the prison walls felt just as heavy as the noise within. Freedom was supposed to feel like lightness—like breath—but to Meekey, it settled on her shoulders like another sentence.

A CO handed her a plastic bag with her name scrawled in black marker. Inside: one pair of jeans, a faded hoodie, a bus pass, seventy-six dollars in cash, and a letter from her daughter—crumpled, worn, read too many times.

She changed in the bathroom by the visitor entrance, staring into the scratched mirror. The woman who looked back wasn’t the same woman who walked in here at twenty-seven. Her eyes had hardened. Hair shot through with strands of gray. A scar on her wrist from a fight in the yard. She'd survived prison. But what was waiting for her out there?

The sun hit her face for the first time without a schedule. She blinked against the light, shielding her eyes as she took her first real steps into a world that had moved on without her.

At the bus stop, Meekey sat down hard, her knees aching—part prison mattress, part age. She looked out over the highway, remembering the last time she saw it through the back of a patrol car, wrists cuffed, high as hell, with sirens wailing in her ears and a betrayal still burning in her chest.

They had caught her with the shipment. Thirty grand worth of product hidden in the trunk of a car that wasn’t even hers. She took the weight. She didn’t name names. Loyalty had been her only code, even when it cost her everything.

Even when it cost her Natalie.

Her baby girl had been eight when they took her away. Now she was twenty-two, somewhere out there in the world, maybe still angry, maybe not. Meekey had written every year. Birthdays. Christmas. The day she first walked. The day she lost her first tooth. All the moments she missed, she tried to stitch back together with ink on paper. But only one letter had ever come back.

"I don’t know who you are anymore. Stop writing."

She never did. She just stopped expecting a reply.

The bus rolled up in a cloud of diesel smoke. Meekey stepped on and dropped into a seat in the back. She hugged the plastic bag to her chest and stared out the window, past towns that blurred together—liquor stores, gas stations, families walking hand in hand.

Her stomach twisted. She hadn’t had a real meal in two days. She hadn’t had a real plan in even longer.

But she had a name. And she still had her silence. She’d kept the secrets, protected the ones who should’ve protected her. Now, maybe it was time they returned the favor.

The city skyline crept closer.

So did the past.

And Meekey? She wasn’t here to start over.

She was here to take back what was hers.