Chapter 32 - The Glass Barrier
The State Department of Corrections Facility stood like an ugly concrete scar against the rolling pines of the northern county. High double fences crowned with razor-sharp concertina wire caught the pale morning mist, while armed guard towers monitored the cold gravel perimeter. Passing through the security checkpoint was an exercise in industrial dehumanization: removing my belt, shoes, and watch, stepping through full-body metal detectors, and having my driver’s license scanned and stamped before an armed correctional officer escorted Marcus and me through three successive electronically locking steel gates.
The institutional hearing wing smelled of floor wax, stale coffee, and institutional despair. Before the parole board convened, the facility protocol permitted a twenty-minute pre-hearing evaluation where the petitioner and the victim representative could meet in a secured consultation booth across a shatterproof glass partition.
I sat on the bolted metal stool, resting my forearms against the laminate counter. A heavy steel door clicked open on the opposite side of the partition, and Preston stepped inside, flanked by a female correctional deputy. He wore an immaculate, starch-pressed beige prisoner uniform. His hair was cropped close, the puffy entitlement of his youth carved away by three years of institutional chow and mandatory physical labor. Yet when he sat down and lifted the black plastic telephone receiver, his eyes bore the exact same predatory calculation that had looked at me across my father’s sickbed.
I lifted my receiver, pressing it to my ear.
"You really drove three hours just to look at me through glass, Harrison?" Preston’s voice buzzed through the static line, flat and devoid of emotion. "Or did you just come to gloat before you let the board send me home?"
"I came to review the foundation, Preston," I replied evenly, my posture straight, unyielding. "You filed a petition claiming you have achieved full rehabilitation. I wanted to see if there was a single brick of truth in that claim."
Preston gave a short, bitter chuckle that ended in a sharp sneer against the glass. "You always were a self-righteous hypocrite. You sit in your suburban fortress with your perfect wife and your golden children, acting like God Almighty, while I’ve spent forty months sleeping on a steel bunk next to murderers. I paid my debt, Harrison. Dad is dead. Mom is in an assisted-living ward coughing her lungs out. What more do you want from me? Blood?"
"I wanted you to recognize what you did," I said softly, looking straight into his pupils. "You stole one hundred and eighty thousand dollars from a man who couldn't defend himself. You abandoned Wyatt and Harper in the heat. And even now, sitting in prison garb with a chaplain’s recommendation in your pocket, you still think you're the victim. You still think you're serving time for our family’s 'unforgiving nature' rather than your own criminal greed."
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Preston’s hands clenched into white-knuckled fists against the counter, his facade cracking in an instant. "I did what I had to do! Dad gave me that money! He would have wanted me to build my company! If you had just backed me up instead of acting like an arrogant cop, we would all be rich right now! You ruined this family, Harrison, not me!"
I slowly lowered the telephone receiver, hung it back on its metal cradle, and stood up without another word. The assessment was complete. The concrete was just as rotten as the day the wall collapsed.
