One Man's Family. Brenda Harlen

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      Joe felt his cheeks burn with shame as he walked away from the table where Alicia remained sitting. Prison rules required that visitors stay seated while the inmate was returned to his cell. He hated her seeing him like this, locked in a cage, unable to move without a security guard shadowing his every step.

      He didn’t need to look back to know that she was watching. She had always watched his back, always stood firm in his corner. She wasn’t just his sister; she was his unwavering champion, and his closest friend.

      And every day since this nightmare had started, he’d thanked God that she was on his side. She was the first person he’d called when he was arrested, the one person he’d always been able to count on, the only person he trusted with the children who owned his heart.

      That thought brought a pang, sharp and deep, as did every thought of Joey and Lia.

      He’d made his own choices, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise. But he’d never imagined that he’d be torn away from them like this, or that every minute away from them would tear him up inside. But even if he’d known then what he knew now, he wouldn’t have changed anything. He couldn’t.

      He’d done what he’d needed to do to protect them. Yet he wasn’t naive enough to believe the decisions he’d made would leave them unscathed. They were just children, after all. Children who had lived the last five years without their mother and who now, for all intents and purposes, had lost their father, too.

      He worried about Joey, his angry and strong-willed son who was balanced on that shaky precipice between childhood and adulthood, a boy in so many ways, a man in too many others. And Lia, his beautiful little princess and the light of his life, who always led with her heart despite the bruises it suffered too frequently and easily.

      He swallowed around the tightness in his throat and stared straight ahead in defiance of the tears that burned his eyes, taking comfort, scant though it was, in the knowledge that his children had Alicia and each other.

      Joey and Lia might bicker and fight as siblings tended to do, but they would stand together when it mattered. As he and Alicia had always stood together.

      Only now they were standing on opposite sides of a prison wall.

      As he waited for the door of his cell to open, he forced that thought from his mind.

      Because he knew that Alicia couldn’t love Joey and Lia any more if they were her own children and would protect them as if they were her own, he felt some measure of comfort.

      He also felt guilt. Because although he’d trusted her with his children, he hadn’t trusted her with the one thing she’d been asking for since his arrest.

      The truth.