The last smile I saw from Tish wasn’t a smile at all. It was the hiss of a snake in a woman’s mouth. I realized then — they’d won the present. Every rumor, every forged paper, every whisper meant to poison my daughter’s heart and Velda’s soul had done its work. The battlefield here was lost.
There was no fixing this world. No court to clear my name. No hand I could shake to make it right. And so, I stopped looking for justice in the daylight.
Instead, I turned to the dark. To the machine.
It wasn’t built from hope. It was built from rage, from love that had nowhere else to go. The copper hummed like a hornet’s nest, wires snaking across concrete floors, circuits glowing with stolen energy. I hadn’t built it to run on gasoline or electricity. No — it ran on me. On everything I couldn’t say out loud. On every night I spent awake with the memory of Velda’s laugh and Trinity’s first cry echoing in my skull.
I remember the first time it shuddered alive. A low hum, like a choir buried under the earth. Lights strobing across the walls like prison guards sweeping their flashlights across a cell. My chest rattled with the sound, like the machine was breathing with me.
And I thought: Good. Breathe, you bastard. Because I’m about to breathe life into you the way they tried to take it from me.
But here’s the truth they’ll never understand: I didn’t build this to escape. I built it to reclaim.
To rewind time until I could stand in the sunlight before the lies took root. Before Michael. Before Tish. Before forged papers told my daughter I was something I never was. Back to when Velda still loved me, when Trinity still looked at me with unbroken eyes.
Because if I can get back there — even once — then all of this? The snakes. The wolves. The poison. It dies in the fire I’ll light.
And so, I fed the machine every betrayal. Every name. Every false charge. And when it finally roared to life — I knew.
There was no going back… except all the way back.