What a joy it is to be loved. To be stripped down to your barest parts and for someone to sit there, mouth agape, admiring what’s left of you. How lucky I am to love, too.

I tell her how much I hate oatmeal raisin cookies. How much I hate what she did to me. But that I’ll always love her. For she is my mother, I am her son. I am the sun to her, she says, not just her son.

God picked my son to die and it’s not fair. He is a murderer and I am merely an intermediate; the puppeteer of purgatory between my son’s life and death who cannot afford to save him.

She didn’t know any prisoners – she was a retired soccer mom from Westchester. The most criminal person she knew was Adam Shore from the country club, who committed a minor case of tax fraud last winter. Elle’s loneliness transcended all sense of logic. She pressed down on the digit and was teleported to the concrete jungle that was Rikers Island.

The men’s laughs of approval rang in his ears like tinnitus. Hugo drove the speed limit to the office, sat down on his swiveling chair, and awaited his nine a.m. regular patient. His degree in psychology from Dartmouth hung crookedly above his head; he remembered a former patient with OCD couldn’t stop complaining about it.