Marta stood up from her chair. She looked down at her mother—the woman she had betrayed her father for, the woman she had called her "reasons."
"You have your reasons, Mom," Marta said, her voice completely flat. "You can think about them for the next fifteen years."
She turned and walked out of the visiting room, her cheap shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. Behind her, Laura began to scream, her hands pounding on the Plexiglas partition until the guard stepped forward to drag her away.
The sun was setting over the Blackwood harbor, painting the sky in deep shades of gold and violet. Andre sat on the wooden pier, his legs dangling over the water. The harbor was quiet now, the fishing boats tied up for the night, their rigging clinking softly in the evening breeze.
Beside him sat a small wooden toolbox. It was the same toolbox he had used twenty-five years ago when he was starting his first delivery company. He had kept it in the back of his closet through all the years of wealth—a quiet reminder of where he had come from.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, old photograph. It was a photo of Marta when she was three years old, sitting on his shoulders at the local park, her small hands holding onto his hair, her face split in a wide, toothy grin. He had carried this photo in his wallet for twenty years. It had been his fuel, his strength, the reason he had hauled bricks until his back bled.
He looked at the little girl in the photo.
"I kept my promise," Andre whispered to the empty harbor. "I gave you a good life. I protected you from the cold." He paused, his fingers tracing the edge of the paper. "But you chose the cold anyway."
He let go of the photo.
The wind caught the paper, spinning it in the air for a brief second before it drifted down, landing on the surface of the dark, salt water. It floated for a moment—the image of the little girl smiling up at the sky—before the water soaked through the paper and it slowly sank into the quiet depths of the harbor.
Andre stood up, picked up his toolbox, and walked back toward his small, warm cottage. Behind him, the stars began to appear, bright and clear in the dark blue sky, lighting the path for a man who had finally, truly found his way home.