Chapter 7 - The View from JolietThe visitation room at the Joliet State Correctional Facility was a grim, windowless space of reinforced concrete and scratched plexiglass dividers. The air smelled of industrial bleach, stale sweat, and old floor wax.
Daniel sat behind the scratched plastic barrier, his orange jumpsuit faded and oversized against his gaunt, hollow frame. His hands were raw from the hard labor details in the laundry facility, his fingernails chewed down to the quick. He looked up with a mixture of desperate hope and sudden terror as the heavy steel door opened, and Claire walked into the room.
She wore a simple, beautifully tailored charcoal wool coat, her dark hair pulled back into a neat chignon, exposing the clean, silver line along her jaw. She didn't sit down on the metal stool. She stood in front of the glass, looking down at him with an expression of pure, detached curiosity.
"Claire... Claire, please," Daniel choked out, his voice cracking against the intercom speaker. "You have to talk to the governor. You have to tell them the restitution has been paid. Miriam Cole took the penthouse, they took the cars, they took my father's old watch. I have nothing left, Claire! I'm sleeping on a steel bunk with three other men! The guards... they don't care who my family was!"
"I know," Claire said, her voice dropping into a low, resonant register that carried perfectly through the plastic barrier. "I’m the one who signed the restitution distribution order, Daniel. I made sure the state took every single asset your name had ever touched. I even bought your father's old pocket watch back from the auction house yesterday. I gave it to Detective Harris as a thank-you gift for his work on the case."
Daniel’s face contorted into a mask of pure, weeping agony, his forehead dropping against the cold plexiglass. "Why are you doing this to me? We were married for eight years, Claire! I loved you! I just lost my temper that one morning—"
"You didn't lose your temper, Daniel," Claire interrupted him, her voice as sharp and cold as a winter morning on the lake. "You tried to destroy my face because you realized you couldn't steal my father's legacy. You thought that if you burned me enough, I would hide in the dark and let you play the king for a few more years. But you forgot one thing about my father's company."
Daniel looked up, his eyes red and wet with pathetic tears. "What... what did I forget?"
May you like
"My father didn't build his lending business on charity, Daniel," Claire said, her gray eyes narrowing into two brilliant points of steel. "He built it on interest. And every time you took a dollar from my family, every time you let your sister laugh at my work, every time you raised your voice in my house—you were just racking up a debt. The coffee was the final invoice. And as you can see, I collect my payments in full."
She turned on her heel, her heavy wool coat swirling around her ankles as she walked out of the visitation room without looking back at the glass. The steel doors slammed shut behind her with a deep, concussive thud that echoed through the concrete corridors, leaving Daniel alone in the dark with nothing but the ticking of the facility clock to keep him company for the next eight years.
