Marshall’s POV

I’d gotten used to silence.

After three weeks alone in a cold gray cell, you stop hearing the noise outside the yelling, the footsteps, the metal clanging. Everything fades until all that’s left is the sound of your own breathing. I’d started to like it that way. No one to talk to, no one to look at, no one to remind me of what I’d lost.

So when the guard banged on my door that morning and said, “You’re getting a cellmate,” my stomach dropped.

I didn’t say anything. Just sat on the edge of the lower bunk and stared at the floor. My mattress was thin and...