Chapter 7 - The Visit to Cook County
Three days after the boardroom purge, the rain had washed the autumn leaves into the gutters along California Avenue in South Chicago.
The maximum-security visitor pavilion of the Cook County Jail was a grim, depressing bunker of scratched plexiglass, peeling green paint, and the pervasive, sickening smell of industrial floor wax and cheap disinfectant.
I sat on the cold metal stool in booth four, wearing a tailored cream cashmere sweater and dark trousers, my diamond stud earrings catching the harsh fluorescent glare above.
The heavy steel door on the opposite side of the glass buzzed open.
A corrections officer escorted Miguel Torres to the stool.
He looked unrecognizable. The arrogant, upwardly mobile corporate climber was completely gone. In his place was a broken, hollow man wearing an oversized, threadbare orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed to a belly chain, his dark hair unwashed and matted, dark purple hollows carved beneath his red, weeping eyes.
He sat down heavily, lifting the scratched plastic telephone receiver with trembling, shackled hands.
I picked up my receiver and held it to my ear.
"Maya..." Miguel wept, pressing his face against the scratched glass, tears carving clean channels through the grime on his sallow cheeks. "Maya, thank God you came. You have to help me. The public defender says the federal prosecutors are refusing to offer a plea deal. They're charging me with thirty counts of felony conspiracy... they're talking about twelve years in a federal penitentiary in Indiana..."
I looked at him through the glass. For twelve years, I had loved this man. I had cooked his meals, ironed his shirts, comforted him when his father died, and swallowed my own grief every time a pregnancy test came back negative.
Yet looking at him now, I felt no anger. I felt no hatred.
I felt only the vast, tranquil indifference of a woman who had finally stepped out of a dark room into the sun.
"Why did you do it, Miguel?" I asked softly, my voice steady through the static of the line. "Twelve years. Was a promotion and a woman in a red suit really worth your entire life?"
Miguel buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders heaving with pathetic, ragged sobs.
"I felt small, Maya!" he cried, looking up with desperate, bloodshot eyes. "Every time I went to dinner with the directors, every time Ethan talked about his private jets and his villas in Aspen... I felt like a peasant! My mother kept telling me that a real man provides an empire, that I was wasting my best years living in a bungalow in Evanston with a woman who couldn't even give me an heir!"
"So you stole," I said flatly. "You signed off on counterfeit titanium implants that were scheduled to be surgically inserted into the spines of twelve thousand patients across this country. Patients like my father, Miguel. Real human beings who would have suffered catastrophic neurological collapse so you could buy Valerie diamond earrings and pay off your mother's mortgage."
"I was stupid! I was blind!" Miguel banged his shackled fists against the metal shelf, making the glass vibrate. "Maya, please! Talk to Richard Vance! He listens to you! The guards in here... they say you're running the company now! You're living in his mansion! Tell him to drop the private civil suit! If he drops the civil suit, the federal prosecutors will reduce the charges to probation!"
A slow, sad smile touched the corners of my mouth.
"Richard Vance doesn't drop suits against people who poison him, Miguel," I said quietly. "And neither do I."
"Maya! No! Please!" Miguel panicked, throwing his entire body against the glass, screaming until his vocal cords tore. "What about our marriage?! What about twelve years together?!"
"Our marriage ended the night you left your phone face-down on the kitchen counter, Miguel," I replied, standing up from the metal stool and smoothing the front of my cashmere sweater. "And your mother was right about one thing."
Miguel stopped, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes. "Right... right about what?"
May you like
"She said I would find out how hard it is to survive without you," I whispered into the receiver. "She just didn't realize that without you... I wouldn't just survive. I would conquer."
I hung up the plastic telephone, turned my back on his frantic, muffled screams, and walked out through the heavy steel security gates into the crisp Chicago morning.
