Chapter 6 - The Confession
By nightfall, the Richmond City Jail interrogation wing was silent, save for the hum of fluorescent lights and the echoing footsteps of guards down the long concrete hall.
I sat on one side of a thick glass partition in a private meeting room, wearing a warm wool sweater, watching through the glass. My father stood quietly in the corner of the room, his arms crossed, watching like a sentinel.
The heavy metal door on the other side of the glass opened. Adrian was led in by a guard, wearing a orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed to a chain around his waist. His hair was messy, his face pale, and dark purple circles bruised the skin under his eyes.
He sat down heavily on the metal stool, looking at me through the glass with eyes full of desperate, hollow pleading. He reached for the phone on his side, and I picked up mine.
“Eleanor... please,” Adrian’s voice shook through the receiver. “You have to help me get bail. The judge set it at five million dollars cash. My dad’s accounts are completely frozen. We can’t even hire a private lawyer—they gave us public defenders!”
“Five million seems fair for a man who tried to murder his daughter and steal forty million dollars,” I said flatly, my voice completely devoid of emotion.
“I didn't try to hurt the baby!” Adrian stammered, tears spilling down his cheeks. “I was angry! My mother... my mother kept pressuring me! She said we were going to lose the house, the cars, everything! She told me you were going to divorce me and take your trust fund away, leaving us with nothing!”
“So you decided to ruin my life instead,” I said.
“I was desperate, Eleanor!” he begged, pressing his cuffed hands against the glass. “Claire was my mother’s idea! Lenora found her, paid her to act like my mistress so you would get emotional and sign the proxy management form for the trust! I never touched Claire! I never loved her! It was all a show to get the money!”
I stared at him through the glass. The man I had lived with for three years, the man I had once believed loved me, was laying every drop of his shame at his mother’s feet, completely incapable of taking responsibility for his own cruelty.
“You punched me, Adrian,” I reminded him, my voice steady and cold. “You looked at me while I was eight months pregnant, called me trash, and hit me with everything you had.”
Adrian froze, his eyes darting away, unable to meet my gaze. “I... I lost my temper...”
“No,” I corrected him softly. “You showed me who you really were. You thought I was weak because I loved you. You thought my father was just a quiet old farmer because he didn't boast about his past. You miscalculated everything.”
I reached into my handbag and pulled out a single sheet of paper, pressing it against the glass partition.
It was a copy of the emergency divorce filing, along with a full termination of his parental rights application.
“Sign the voluntary termination papers, Adrian,” I said into the receiver. “If you sign them now, my father’s legal team will not oppose reducing your father’s charges from organized crime to simple fraud, which means he might actually survive his prison sentence.”
Adrian stared at the paper, then at my face. “You’re stripping me of everything... my name, my money, my daughter...”
“You stripped yourself of those things the moment you swung your fist,” I replied.
Slowly, with shaking hands, Adrian held up his cuffed hands and nodded to the guard to bring him a pen. He signed the legal document through the tray slot, his tears smudging the black ink.
I took the signed paper back, slid it neatly into my handbag, and hung up the receiver.
I stood up, adjusting my coat.
May you like
“Goodbye, Adrian,” I whispered through the glass.
I turned my back on his weeping form and walked out of the room with my father, leaving him alone in the dark.
