She keeps calling him that old name-- Jims, just like when she was a baby and she couldn't work out saying his whole name in her tiny voice. Jims, the name she used to chant when he'd come home and she'd run to greet him with a wide happy smile showing missing baby teeth. Jims, the name she called him when she used to love him like he could do no wrong. It ain't ever gonna be like that again. No matter what she says, he's sure she's looking at him and seeing nothing much beyond trouble she doesn't need anymore. She shook him off like a bad dream the moment he was sentenced. He went to death row feeling so awful terrible low, and he only got lower when he realized his baby girl-- his whole world-- wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Sometimes the dismissal makes him angry, but most of the time it just makes him ache so bad he wonders if the pain will ever stop pressing down on him like a crushing, ribcage-flattening weight. He listens to her explain, but it hardly changes a thing. She probably would have let him die in there without ever having the grace to tell him what had become of her if all of this hadn't happened.
He lifts his hand to her fist anyway, drawing it away from his sleeve so he can close his hand around hers, so small and smooth in his big rough grip. He shouldn't. But he thought he'd never see her again, and he's feeling greedy despite himself. "Yeah. Alright," he says, eyes cast somewhere beside her face instead of looking directly at her. "I was gone." He pauses then, looking down when he notices something on her hand. A ring. He can feel it when he squeezes her hand in his own. He opens his fingers enough that he can look, and there's no mistaking what kind of ring that is. Whatever's left of his heart takes another crushing blow, pounded to dust by now. He closes his hand and covers up that ring, not letting go of her anyway. "Guess you want what you came here for then, huh?"