Good Behavior

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
—

She'd been out of prison now almost ten months, had been clean for half a year, but she hardly felt free.

She was thirty-six years old and she had just worked herself into a sweat cleaning a toilet in a diner.

Bad as prison had been, the walls that had kept her in her cell and in the yard had never screamed hopelessness as loud as the barred window in this tiny bathroom.

Her life seemed to be defined by moments like these.

Moments of pure self-hatred.

And this was just one more in a long, long line.

It wasn't the first or the second or even the third time she'd had a firearm pointed at her. But she never got used to that gaping black hole. Couldn't take her eyes off of it. If [spoiler] chose to pull the trigger in this moment, it was the last thing she'd ever see.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Thomas & Mercer via NetGalley in exchange for this post – thanks to both for this.
N.B.: As this was an ARC, any quotations above may be changed in the published work – I will endeavor to verify them as soon as possible.