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“Return to normal life.” As if I or any of my brothers ever had that luxury.
She’s a crusader.
One of those women who thinks they can make a change in the world. The more dramatic the change, the more satisfying it will be for her. She could be vaccinating orphans in Guatemala, or sifting plastic out of the ocean. Instead she’s here trying to reform the scum of the earth.
I look at her gleaming shoes, her leather briefcase, her tailored suit. All deliberately simple and unadorned, but discernibly expensive, nonetheless.
“What’s a little rich girl like you doing in a place like this?” I say. “Surely there were better options once you graduated from… Columbia, I’d guess?”
Her lips bleach white as she presses them tightly together.
This is too easy.
“We’re not here to talk about me,” she says.
“But you think I should bare my soul to you. A stranger. Who doesn’t want to answer a simple question about herself.”
I can see her chest rising and falling under the modest blazer. I see the flutter of her pulse in the delicate hollow of her throat.
“Anything you say to me is confidential,” she says. “It can’t be used against you in legal proceedings.”
“That’s closing the barn door after the horse fled,” I say. “I’m on a twenty-five-year sentence.”
“Yes,” Clare says, her fingertips flexing ever so slightly on the manila folder that surely contains a record of all my misdeeds. All the ones they know about, that is. “For the murder of your fiancée, Roxanne Maguire.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I snap, rougher than I intended.
“We don’t have to talk about it today,” Clare says, with a slight emphasis on the wordtoday,implying that it’s a topic she will certainly return to in the future.
She won’t like the response she gets if she tries.
Irresistibly, her eyes are drawn to my two massive hands folded on the tabletop. The thick, calloused fingers. The blunt nails. The tattoos on my knuckles and the backs of my hands. Her eyes roam up my heavily veined forearms and then to my biceps which are straining the limits of the XXXL prison uniform that still barely fits.
The words in that folder must be echoing inside her head.
Sexually assaulted…
Skull fractured by a wine bottle…
Cause of death: strangulation…
“Isn’t it an impediment to your work to be beautiful?” I ask her.
She lets out a huff of air, half disbelieving, half flustered.
“I’m not—please don’t try to manipulate me with flattery.”
“I’m not flattering you. You’re a stunning woman, trying to work with murderers and rapists. You’re telling me that’s not a distraction?”
She frowns.
“It’s not an issue.”
“That’s impossible.”
Now she looks almost angry.
“I’m nothing special,” she says, bluntly.
