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I gave him my sweetest smile.
He shook his head. “You won’t have to do any of that. I’ll... I’ll do what I can. What do you need?”
“I need Emory Abbot to go to hell.”
34
Elijah
Come back and haunt me, June.
Come back and show me how to stop hurting.
How will I do this without you? How will Sally do it without you?
I looked at the notebook entry from five years ago.
The page was crumpled to the point of being crunchy. It looked fragile. Almost as fragile as my heart had been the night of July 30, 2017.
At the very end of the page, I’d signed my name one last time.
That was the last I’d hear of Elex. By the time I got to the last line, I’d made up my mind to bury him in the past.
With her.
But I’d had one more task to complete before that. And it was an important one.
“We’re here.”
I nodded to the driver, paid my fare, and stepped out of the cab.
The East Bay Penitentiary Center loomed before me. If there were ever a purgatory on Earth, it had to be this place.
I scanned the towering gray walls, their color mirroring the desolation inside me. The building, cold and ragged, loomed high above, almost stretching into the sky. It reminded me of an ancient fortress with its massive towers and fortified gates.
Barbed wire lined the top of the walls. Even with the quiet thudding of rage in my heart, I could not help shivering at the thought of what lay behind them.
There were rows of small, barred windows dotting the walls. They looked like tiny eyes peering out into the world. The windows were too high up for me to look inside.
Not that I needed to. I could already see the stark concrete floors, stony cells, and metal bunkers inside. The very air felt heavy. Oppressed. It was as if the very walls were loaded with the weight of all the guilt consuming those inside.
Even the sunlight felt dimmer here. Almost nonexistent.
Funny, how I’d never thought I’d ever have to think about prison apart from my occasional annoyance about taxes.
Funny, how I’d even felt glad there were rehabilitation programs for the inmates. It was human to have those emotions, right? It was human to want them to do better.
Until two nights ago, when one call would change the trajectory of my life forever. I’d been getting too many of those lately.
People wishing me well. Feeling sorry for me. Pity dripping out of their voices like saccharine honey, so sweet it made my teeth shake and chatter.
People who, in the secret confines of their homes, hoped they’d never have to face the same fate.
These were well-wishers all the way from my home country. I wasn’t very known in the social circles of NYC. Except the small one involving Noah and Benjamin.
So, they had no idea how so much had gone wrong. Most of them called intending to comfort. But people had a strange habit of making a situation worse, even with the best of intentions.
Every time someone the length of an ocean away asked me what had happened, I was forced to recount a nightmare. The worst thing? Even I didn’t know what had happened.
