Chapter 9 - The Concrete Reality
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was cold, damp, and smelled of industrial bleach and old cabbage.
Six months had passed since the night in the Vanguard lobby.
Richard Hayes sat behind a thick sheet of scratch-resistant plexiglass in the non-contact visitation room. He wore a faded, oversized beige jumpsuit with his inmate registration number stamped across the left shoulder in black ink.
His hair had been shaved down to the scalp due to a lice outbreak in Cell Block D three weeks prior. He had lost thirty pounds; his cheekbones jutted out like sharp stones beneath his pale, papery skin. A jagged scar ran from his left eyebrow down to his cheek—a souvenir from a cafeteria dispute over an extra carton of skim milk during his first week inside.
The steel door on the opposite side of the glass buzzed open.
Richard looked up, his heart leaping into his throat. He had submitted twenty-four visitation requests over the past one hundred and eighty days. Twenty-three had been summarily rejected.
A woman walked into the booth and sat down on the bolted metal stool.
It wasn't me.
It was Chloe Vance.
Richard stared at her through the glass, his mouth opening and closing in disbelief.
Chloe looked unrecognizable. She wore a faded navy-blue windbreaker over a plain white polo shirt, dark cotton slacks, and worn black non-slip service shoes. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a simple, un-styled ponytail. Her nails were short, unpainted, and had tiny flecks of dirt beneath the cuticles. She wore no makeup, no jewelry, not even a simple pair of silver studs in her ears.
Richard picked up the heavy plastic telephone receiver on his side of the partition.
Chloe hesitated for three long seconds before lifting her receiver to her ear.
"Chloe?" Richard breathed against the plastic mouthpiece, his voice shaking with desperate emotion. "Chloe, baby... you came. Thank God. Did your father talk to the sentencing judge? My lawyer says if the Vance family submits a letter of leniency, the federal guidelines drop from twenty-five years to seven—"
"I didn't come to help you, Richard," Chloe said.
Her voice had none of the musical, arrogant lilt it possessed at the gala. It was flat, exhausted, and weighed down by months of real, grinding labor.
Richard froze. "What?"
"I came because my therapist said I needed to look at you one last time to purge the poison from my life," Chloe said, staring at his scar with cold detachment. "I’m working sixty hours a week at the Saint Jude Food Bank in Newark. I unpack crates of canned green beans. I mop floors. I hand out frozen turkeys to single mothers whose lives you tried to destroy with your subprime corporate bonds."
"Chloe, listen to me!" Richard pleaded, pressing his palm flat against the cold glass. "We were a team! We were going to rule Vanguard together! Victoria set us up! She orchestrated this whole thing to punish us—"
"Victoria Sullivan saved my life," Chloe interrupted sharply.
Richard blinked, stunned into silence.
"If she hadn't destroyed you that night," Chloe said, a tear finally escaping her eye and tracking down her bare cheek, "I would have married you. I would have signed corporate co-guarantees for your offshore accounts. When your house of cards collapsed—and it would have collapsed—I would be sitting in a women's penitentiary right now while you tried to sell me out to save your own skin."
"No! I loved you, Chloe!"
"You loved my father’s corporate shares," Chloe spat, her lip trembling with genuine disgust. "You loved the penthouse. You loved the idea of a girl from the Upper East Side looking at an ambitious nobody from Queens like he was a king."
She leaned in closer to the glass, her gaze piercing through his pathetic facade.
"I saw Stella last week," Chloe whispered.
Richard’s eyes went wide. "You saw Stella? Why? Where?"
"Victoria brought her to the food bank," Chloe said softly. "The Sullivan Foundation donated six million dollars to build a new refrigerated wing. Stella walked in holding her mother’s hand. She was wearing that same yellow raincoat... but this time, around her neck, she wore a gold-and-emerald star made by the finest jewelers in Paris."
Chloe smiled—a sad, beautiful, real smile that Richard had never seen on her face during all their months of luxury dinners.
"Stella looked at me, Richard. She didn't recognize me without the emerald dress and the diamonds. She just handed me a juice box and said, *'Here you go, miss. You look tired.'*"
A harsh, jagged sob broke from Richard’s chest. He dropped his head, his forehead thudding against the plexiglass.
"She’s happy, Richard," Chloe said, her voice dropping to a final, irrevocable whisper. "She doesn't even ask about you anymore. When people ask about her father, she tells them: *'I don't have a father. I have a mother who owns the sky.'*"
Chloe hung up the receiver.
She stood up from the stool, turned her back on him, and walked through the buzzing steel door without looking back once.
May you like
Richard sat alone in the booth, the dead dial tone buzzing in his ear, screaming silently against the glass until the guards dragged him back into the shadows of the cell block.
***
