He looked down at his hands. “I took a bus for three hours. I got a job at a fleet garage on the South Side. I’m renting a room above a laundromat.” He swallowed hard, tears finally spilling over his freezing cheeks.

“Ashley’s gone. The company’s gone. I have nothing. I sit in that room at night, and all I can think about is you standing in the rain. I can’t sleep, Mom.

I can’t breathe.”

He lifted the crumpled paper bag and pushed it clumsily through the gaps in the bars. “I brought this,” he whispered.

Linda looked inside. A loaf of cheap white bread, a small carton of milk, and a box of chamomile tea — the exact items she’d been holding the night he locked her out of her life.

A pathetic, meager offering. An olive branch bought with the last few dollars in his pocket.