Chapter 14 - The Sing Sing Reckoning
Z
The visitation room at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, was a stark, joyless chamber of cinderblock walls and heavy steel mesh.
Ethan Hayes was brought into the room by two heavily armed corrections guards.
He was clad in the maximum-security green prison uniform. His hands and feet were bound by heavy chains that clanked against the concrete floor with every shuffling step. The six months in prison had aged him by fifteen years; his face was gaunt, his styled hair had been shaved down to the scalp, and a fresh purple scar ran across his left cheekbone from a prison yard brawl.
When he saw me sitting across the steel table, his shoulders slumped. There was no rage left in him. No arrogance. No threats. He looked like a hollow, broken shell of the man who had once ruled boardrooms.
The guards locked his waist chain to the steel eyelet bolted into the concrete floor and stepped back against the wall.
Ethan collapsed onto the steel stool, his chained hands resting heavily on the table.
“Claire,” he rasped, his voice cracked and dry.
I looked at him silently for a long moment. Five years of marriage, thousands of shared days, and it had all come down to this sterile, fluorescent-lit cage.
“I saw the news on the block television,” Ethan whispered, looking down at his scarred knuckles. “Alexander Montgomery was arrested. The Sovereign was foreclosed. The restitution fund was approved.”
“Yes,” I said calmly.
“My mother?” he asked, a tremor of desperation in his voice.
“Diane is serving her seven-year sentence in Danbury,” I replied. “She’s safe, Ethan. Which is more than she deserves after what you two tried to do to me.”
Ethan closed his eyes, a single tear cutting a track through the grime on his cheek. “I never meant to hurt you, Claire. You have to believe me. Alexander was threatening to kill me! He said if I didn't get your signature on those air rights, he would have my body thrown into the East River! I was terrified!”
“You were terrified of losing your money, Ethan,” I corrected him, my voice ice-cold. “You weren't thinking about your life; you were thinking about your luxury cars, your designer suits, and your vanity. When you cut my brake lines on the West Side Highway, you weren't under duress. You were committing cold-blooded, premeditated murder.”
“I’m sorry,” Ethan sobbed, burying his face in his chained hands. The metal links rattled violently against the steel table. “I’m so sorry, Claire. Please... talk to the DA. Tell them to reduce my sentence. I can't survive twenty-eight years in this place! They beat me in here! They take everything I have!”
I leaned forward, looking into his bloodshot, tear-filled eyes.
“Do you remember what you yelled at me in that hospital room, Ethan?” I asked.
He froze, his breath hitching in his throat.
“You grabbed my fractured arm, punched your fists into my internal stitches, and shouted: ‘I’m not wasting another dollar on you!’”
Ethan flinched as if the words physically burned him.
“You thought I was weak because I chose to be quiet,” I said, every word measured and deliberate. “You thought my silence meant I was blind to your crimes. But in the end, Ethan, you didn't waste a dollar on me. You wasted your entire life on a lie.”
I stood up from the steel stool, smoothing the fabric of my tailored coat.
“You will serve every single day of your twenty-eight years, Ethan,” I said, looking down at him without a shred of pity. “You will never see a dime of the trust, you will never walk the streets of New York again as a free man, and you will never hear my voice after today.”
“Claire! Don't leave me here! Claire!” Ethan screamed, lunging forward until his waist chain snapped taut, jerking him violently backward onto the stool.
The guards immediately stepped in, pinning his shoulders to the table as he thrash-wept against his restraints.
May you like
I turned my back on him and walked toward the heavy steel door.
As the buzzer sounded and the door slid open, I didn't look back once.
