Marisol

POV: Ricki

She came on a Tuesday, and she looked exactly the same, which was the part that broke him. The world outside had kept going without touching her at all, like grief only worked on people behind glass.

Ricki sat down across from her and felt the months collapse into nothing. Marisol's face was the one he'd carried behind his eyes every night since the verdict, dark hair pulled back the same careless way, the same small scar above her eyebrow from a bike wreck when she was twelve. But up close, the sameness cracked. She was thinner, the kind of thin that came from forgetting to eat rather than choosing to, shadows sitting heavy under her eyes that no concealer had fully covered.

She wore the jacket he'd bought her two Christmases ago, faded now at the elbows, denim with an embroidered patch on the shoulder she'd picked herself and made him buy under protest, arguing it was too plain for the price tag. Seeing it now felt like being handed a photograph of a life that had stopped belonging to him the second the cuffs closed.

"Hi," she said, voice small through the receiver, testing the word's weight before committing to it.

"Hi." His own voice came out rough, unpracticed, a tool he'd forgotten how to use for anything but answering counts and mumbling apologies to guards.

"You look thinner," she said, mouth twitching toward a smile that didn't arrive.

"Everybody keeps telling me that," he said, and the silence afterward sat on both of them like a third body in the booth.

They held their receivers a moment, the plastic suddenly too heavy for the little air moving through it. Watching her, Ricki understood that neither of them knew how to fill thirty minutes with a relationship built on years of easy, unstructured time and now rationed down to a clock bolted to a guard station wall.

They talked about nothing that mattered, because nothing that mattered fit safely inside a room like this. Her promotion, which she described with more exhaustion than pride. Her mother's health, stable for now. A friend's wedding Ricki had missed and would keep missing, along with every ordinary milestone that used to belong to both of them together.

He tried once, carefully, to explain the world he'd landed in. The classifications. The suppressants that turned every meal into ash on his tongue. The word LATENT sitting on a screen that made every predator in the building turn and study him like prey they hadn't identified yet.

Marisol's face changed as he talked, something shuttering behind her eyes that he couldn't read, disbelief or belief, he genuinely couldn't tell which. Either way the distance between them widened by the same exact measure.

"That's a lot," she said finally, voice careful, the tone people use when deciding whether fear or concern is the safer mask. "Are they treating you okay in there?"

"Someone reached out to me a few weeks back," she added, quieter, like she wasn't sure she should say it at all. "Some podcast thing. Asked about your case. Said it fit a pattern they were looking into, Compact classifications, whatever that means. I didn't know what to say. I still don't."

His stomach tightened. "You didn't call them back."

"No," she said, too fast, like she needed the answer settled before he could ask again. "I don't know why I even kept the number."

"I'm fine," Ricki said, the same lie he fed his mothers, the same lie that was starting to feel less like a lie and more like the only language this place left him room to speak.

She didn't push. Watching her not push, he understood she'd already decided the conversation was too big to hold onto tightly, and something in him ached at how fast she'd learned to let him go.

"Two minutes," the guard barked, and Ricki's chest seized the way it always did at that sound, the specific cruelty of a clock that decided how much of a person you were allowed to keep.

Marisol pressed her palm flat to the glass, fingers spread. Ricki matched her without thinking. He could see the shape of her hand. He couldn't feel a thing.

He held his palm there anyway, greedy for even that fraction of contact, some animal part of him screaming that this wasn't enough, had never been enough, would never be enough no matter how long he pressed against a barrier with no intention of moving.

"I love you," Marisol said, voice cracking slightly on the last word.

"I love you too," Ricki answered, throat tight.

Neither said anything else. Nothing else would have fit in the time left.

She stood when the guard called time. Ricki watched her walk toward the far door, watched her shrink and then vanish entirely, and he sat there a moment longer than his escort wanted before finally standing on legs unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with muscle.

Her scent hit him on the way out, sharp and unmistakable, clinging to the booth the same impossible way his mothers' detergent had clung to the visitation room weeks before, except this one carried something rawer underneath, memory stacked on memory, every morning he'd woken beside that scent without once thinking to memorize it because he'd assumed, foolishly, there would always be more mornings.

It was strong enough to make his eyes water. He stood there blinking against it, furious at his own body for holding onto something this vivid, this cruel, when everything else about life inside these walls kept insisting that feeling anything this sharply was a luxury he no longer had space for.

He wondered, walking back through the corridor, if she was still sitting in the parking lot the way she used to after hard conversations, engine off, radio off, just breathing before she trusted herself to drive.

***

Outside, Marisol sat in her car without starting the engine.

She pulled her phone from her bag and scrolled to a number she'd saved three weeks earlier, after a message came through from a producer working some kind of podcast, something about unusual criminal cases, Compact classifications specifically, cases falling into gaps the regular justice system didn't know how to name.

She'd told Ricki she didn't know why she'd kept it. That wasn't entirely true. Some small, stubborn part of her still believed that a system capable of doing this to someone she loved might also be a system capable of being wrong in a way somebody, somewhere, would eventually have to answer for.

She stared at the number a long moment, thumb hovering over the call button.

She didn't press it.

She didn't delete the number either.

She sat there a while longer, engine still off, the visitation building's gray walls shrunk small and distant in her rearview mirror. Finally, slowly, she put the phone away and started the car, driving off without making the call.

The number stayed exactly where it was.