Chapter 9 - The Final Confrontation
One month later.
The state maximum-security detention center sat like a grey concrete fortress on the outskirts of the city. The rain had finally given way to a bright, cold autumn afternoon.
I sat in a private glass-partitioned visitor room, wearing a warm wool sweater. On the other side of the thick glass, Marianne was led in by two female guards.
She wore a orange jumpsuit, her hair unwashed and pulled back in a messy bun, her face lined with deep, dark wrinkles that made her look twenty years older than she was. Her diamonds were gone, replaced by plastic wristbands.
She sat down heavily on the metal stool, looking at me through the glass with eyes hollowed out by despair. She slowly picked up the intercom phone, and I lifted mine.
“Nathan...” her voice was dry, raspy, completely broken. “Did you come here to gloat?”
“No,” I said calmly. “I came to bring you a letter.”
I pressed a folded sheet of paper against the glass partition.
“What is it?” she asked, her hands shaking as she looked at the text through the glass.
“It’s a formal court order terminating your parental and familial rights to Emma and Hope forever,” I said flatly. “You will never see my wife again. You will never hear her voice. And my daughter will grow up never knowing your name.”
Marianne let out a quiet, pathetic sob, her forehead dropping against the cold glass. “Nathan... please... I’m her mother... I was sick... the gambling debts... they threatened to kill me!”
“You chose your gambling debts over your daughter’s life, Marianne,” I said, my voice completely devoid of pity. “You looked at her eight-month pregnant stomach, knew she was conscious inside that coffin, and told the funeral director to hurry up with the cremation.”
“I didn't know she was conscious!” Marianne wept, banging her hand weakly against the glass. “Julian swore she wouldn't feel anything!”
“Which makes you a coward as well as a monster,” I replied. “Darren accepted a thirty-year plea bargain this morning. Dr. Julian got life without parole. And your trial starts next month. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in a small, windowless box, Marianne.”
She looked up at me, tears streaming down her pale, sunken cheeks, begging for a single drop of mercy that she had denied her own child.
“Why did you come here, Nathan?” she whispered.
“To make sure you understood one thing,” I said, leaning closer to the glass, looking her dead in the eye. “You thought I was weak because I loved your daughter softly. You thought I was broken because I grieved. But the love you mocked is the very thing that destroyed you.”
May you like
I hung up the receiver, stood up, and slid the court order into the document slot beneath the partition.
I turned my back on her hysterical weeping and walked out through the heavy steel doors into the bright, clean daylight.
