Chapter 8 - The Visitation Glass
Three weeks later, the sky above New York was the color of slate.
The Manhattan Detention Complex—colloquially known as "The Tombs"—sat like an ugly concrete scar amidst the courthouses of Lower Manhattan. The air inside the subterranean visitors’ wing smelled of floor stripper, sour coffee, and industrial despair.
I sat on a metal stool behind a two-inch-thick pane of scratched, bulletproof Plexiglas.
The heavy steel door on the prisoner’s side clanged open.
Grant was escorted in by two corrections officers. His hands were cuffed to a belly chain, his ankles shackled so closely together that he had to shuffle forward an inch at a time. The bespoke charcoal suits and French-cuffed shirts were gone, replaced by a dingy, oversized orange jumpsuit that was frayed at the collar. His silver-flecked hair was greasy, unwashed, and standing up in ragged tufts. His face was hollowed out, gray, and covered in an uneven beard.
He looked sixty years old.
He sat down heavily on the metal stool across from me, the chains rattling loudly against the steel counter. He picked up the heavy black plastic telephone receiver with trembling fingers.
I picked up mine.
"You came," Grant whispered. His voice was hoarse, shredded from weeks of screaming in a windowless cell.
"I came because the divorce papers were finalized this morning," I said, my voice coming through the receiver with crystal clarity. "Judge Vance—no relation to Dad, ironically—granted an immediate dissolution of marriage based on felony conviction and marital abandonment. You have been officially stripped of any legal claim to the Vance name, the estate, the properties, and the accounts."
Grant let out a broken, wheezing laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete.
"You think I care about the divorce, Natalie? Look at me! Look at where I am! The District Attorney filed the notice for the death penalty yesterday! Aggravated capital murder for financial gain!"
"I know," I said. "I signed the affidavit confirming the premeditation timeline."
Grant slammed his cuffed hands against the Plexiglas. The loud *thud* made the guard in the corner put his hand on his baton, but I didn't even flinch. I didn't blink.
"You're a monster!" Grant hissed, pressing his face against the glass, his eyes bulging with manic desperation. "I made you! You were a pathetic, introverted academic when I found you! I taught you how to dress, how to talk, how to live in this world! And you're sending me to the electric chair!"
"You didn't make me, Grant," I said softly. "You used me. You were drowning in debt, and you latched onto my father’s empire like a leech. And when Dad finally pulled the rock back and let the light hit you, you reacted like the parasite you are: you poisoned him."
"Victoria did it!" he screamed into the receiver. "She bought the seeds! She brewed the extract! She told me Arthur would just feel sick and back off the audit! She lied to me!"
"Victoria accepted a plea deal two hours ago, Grant," I told him.
Grant froze, his breath catching in his throat. "What?"
"Forty years without parole," I said. "In exchange for her full, unreserved testimony at your trial. She provided the encrypted text messages from your private server. The ones where you told her, and I quote: *'Once the old man's heart stops, Natalie will be too broken to fight. We take the trust, liquidate the holding company, and disappear.'*"
Grant dropped the receiver. It swung against the metal wall, clicking rhythmically against the steel like a metronome counting down the seconds of his life.
He buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders shaking as violent, ragged sobs tore from his chest.
I watched him. I waited for the pang of pity. I waited for the lingering ghost of the love I had carried for fifteen years to stir in my chest and whisper that this was tragic.
Nothing stirred.
The man who had stood beside me at my father’s funeral, holding his mistress’s hand while she wore my stolen dress, was already dead. The thing crying on the other side of the glass was merely a shell waiting for the executioner.
I tapped the glass with my wedding ring—the heavy platinum band that I had taken off my finger this morning.
Grant slowly lifted his tear-streaked, devastated face.
I picked up the phone receiver one last time. He reached out with trembling fingers, picking up his.
"Natalie... please," he whimpered. "Please tell them to take the death penalty off the table. Please. I'll plead guilty. I'll take life without parole. Just... don't let them kill me."
I held my platinum wedding ring up against the glass so he could see it clearly in the fluorescent light.
Then, I opened my hand and let it drop into the metal trash chute built into the counter.
The ring clattered down into the dark, vanishing forever.
"Goodbye, Grant," I said.
May you like
I hung up the receiver, stood up from the stool, and turned my back on him. His screams and the rattling of his chains against the counter followed me down the corridor, but by the time I reached the heavy iron doors that led out to the street, the sound had faded completely into the cold, clean air of New York City.
***
