Chapter 18 - The Visitor in Prison Greens
One week later, I stood once again inside the cold, concrete perimeter of Danbury.
This time, I was not summoned by fear or mystery. I came of my own volition, dressed in a tailored charcoal wool coat, carrying a single leather folder containing the final decree of the Surrogate’s Court.
Victoria was brought into the small glass-divided booth. The week had not been kind to her. A fresh purple bruise blossomed along her left cheekbone—a clear sign that the social hierarchies of federal prison did not bend to high-society tantrums.
When she picked up the black plastic telephone receiver on her side of the glass, her hand was trembling violently.
I lifted mine.
"Did you come to bring me bail?" she asked, her voice cracking with desperation, any semblance of her previous arrogance entirely shattered. "Clara, please. You have to get Julian to file an appeal. They put me in general population. A woman threw a plastic tray at my face yesterday because I wouldn't give her my dessert. I can't stay here! I'm going to die in here!"
"You're not going to die, Victoria," I said into the receiver. "You're going to serve sixteen more months. And then you are going to complete five hundred hours of community service."
"You don't understand!" Victoria sobbed, pressing her forehead against the scratched Plexiglas. "Mom and Dad won't answer the phone! Their number was disconnected! Where are they? Why aren't they paying my appellate retainer?"
"They can't pay it," I told her gently. "They have nothing left. The Queens house was foreclosed on by the city for back taxes two days ago. They’ve been moved into a subsidized senior living unit in Staten Island."
Victoria gasped, her bloodshot eyes darting frantically. "And the manor? Did Graves take the manor?"
"Graves transferred the deed," I said, holding up the court order against the glass.
Victoria squinted at the document. Her eyes scanned the legal header, down to the beneficiary line.
*Clara Thomas Graves-Sterling.*
She dropped the receiver. It swung on its heavy coiled metal cord, banging against the metal partition with a rhythmic, hollow clang.
Victoria stared at me through the glass, her mouth open in absolute, paralyzed shock. The realization of her total, irreversible defeat washed over her features like a bucket of lye.
She slowly picked the receiver back up, bringing it to her ear with mechanical stiffness.
"You're not... you're not Richard’s daughter," she whispered.
"No," I replied. "I'm not."
"Then the Montgomery trust... the Sterling jewelry... the estate..."
"It was never yours, Victoria," I said, my voice steady, stripped of vengeance, holding only the cold weight of truth. "Your mother spent twenty years trying to steal an inheritance that belonged to Thomas Graves’s child. She gave you everything to compensate for the fact that she was living in a house built on another man’s blood. And you took that unearned privilege and used it to torment me."
Tears streamed down Victoria’s hollow cheeks, cutting clean tracks through the grime on her skin.
"What am I supposed to do when I get out?" she whimpered. "I don't know how to do anything, Clara. I don't have a degree. I don't have a resume. Nobody will ever hire me."
I looked at my half-sister—the girl who had once made two hundred people laugh as I sat on the floor in an emerald dress.
"You will learn," I said. "Just like I had to learn."
May you like
I hung up the receiver, stood up from the stool, and walked toward the heavy steel door. I did not look back when she began to scream my name against the glass.
***
