Chapter 19 - The Final Visit
I didn't have to go.
Marcus Hayes had told me I had zero legal obligation to respond to the prisoner visitation request forwarded by the warden’s office at Victorville. The federal restraining order was permanent and absolute; if I wanted to spend the rest of my days pretending Adrian Sterling had never existed, the entire power of the United States government would enforce my silence.
Yet, on a Tuesday morning before heading back to San Francisco, I found myself sitting in a private, glass-partitioned visitation cubicle deep within the concrete belly of the federal penitentiary.
The air in the room was stale, smelling of industrial floor wax and cold recirculated air.
A heavy steel door buzzed loudly on the prisoner's side of the glass.
Adrian was led in by two corrections officers, his orange jumpsuit sagging on his emaciated frame, his wrists shackled to a belly chain. He sat down heavily on the bolted steel stool across from me.
The burns on the right side of his face had healed into thick, shiny, mottled purple keloid scars, pulling the corner of his mouth down into an involuntary, permanent sneer. His right ear was misshapen, half-eaten away by the infection that had set in before his arrest.
He picked up the heavy black plastic telephone receiver with trembling, shackled hands.
I reached out and picked up mine.
"You came," Adrian said, his voice cracked, weak, and stripped of all its former corporate melody.
"I didn't come for you," I said, my voice dead, level, and utterly calm. "I came to look at you."
He flinched, his good eye watering as he leaned closer to the scratched, heavy plexiglass separating us. "Claire... you have to talk to Hayes. You have to tell them I didn't want to hit you. I lost my mind. The pressure from my father, the debts... I was trying to protect you from him."
I almost laughed. The sheer, pathetic predictability of an abuser in a cage was almost boring.
"You paid fifty thousand dollars to have me murdered in my own living room, Adrian," I said, not a drop of emotion in my tone. "You took out an insurance policy on my life. You held Rebecca in a hole for three years. You poisoned Arthur."
"They forced me!" he pleaded, his voice rising, a fleck of spittle hitting the glass. "Charles made me do it! Eleanor demanded the money! If I didn't do it, they were going to disinherit me!"
"And that's the difference between you and me," I said, leaning forward until my eyes locked onto his with hypnotic, terrifying clarity. "You would kill your own blood to keep a piece of stolen dirt. I walked into that dining room owning my own life, and I walked out owning yours."
Adrian stared at me, his scarred lip trembling violently. "Claire... please. Don't leave me in here. I won't survive this place. You don't know what they do to men like me in here."
"I know exactly what they do," I said softly. "They make you invisible. Just like you tried to make Rebecca. Just like you tried to make me."
I reached into my handbag, pulled out a small, folded piece of paper, and pressed it against the thick glass.
It was a certified copy of the final divorce decree, signed that morning by the presiding family court judge.
My name was restored to Claire Avery.
Every joint account was dissolved. Every penny of his remaining corporate pension had been transferred directly into the victims' compensation fund.
"You don't exist to me anymore, Adrian," I said into the receiver. "You are just an inmate number in a federal database."
"Claire! Don't hang up! Claire, wait!" he screamed, slamming his shackled fists against the glass as the guards stepped forward to grab his shoulders. "Look at me! CLAIRE!"
I hung the receiver back on its metal cradle.
May you like
The sound of his screaming was instantly cut off by the three-inch-thick acoustic glass.
I stood up, adjusted the lapels of my blazer, and walked out the heavy steel door into the bright California sun, without looking back a single time.
