Chapter 12

The Wolferton correctional prison visitor lounge smelled of burnt coffee, industrial floor cleaner, and damp concrete. Beneath it all lingered a stale, sour odor that seemed embedded in the walls, the furniture, and the very air circulating through the building.

The room was long and narrow, its walls painted a tired institutional gray that had yellowed in places beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. The fixtures buzzed overhead, casting a sickly pallor across everything they touched. The floor was clean in the technical sense, but its worn surface was scuffed and dull, with dark streaks that no amount of mopping seemed capable of removing.

Laminate tables stood bolted to the floor, their edges chipped and their surfaces scarred by countless hands and years of careless use. Hard plastic chairs surrounded them, their faded blue seats scratched and dulled, some bearing old cracks that had been crudely patched. Everything had been chosen to endure, to be cleaned quickly, and to discourage anyone from forgetting where they were.

Somewhere beyond the lounge, a door slammed with a metallic crash, followed by the sharp clatter of locks. A guard called out a name. Footsteps echoed down the corridor, then faded into the constant mechanical hum of the prison.

A few visitors sat scattered around the room, hunched over tables or leaning forward in their chairs. Conversations remained low and subdued, broken by long silences and the occasional strained laugh that died almost as soon as it began. Across from them, inmates in matching uniforms tried to make the most of their allotted time. Some reached across the tables to hold hands. Others sat stiffly, struggling to find something to say. Everyone seemed aware of the clock, even when nobody looked at it.

Vernon sat at one of the small tables near the center of the room, his hands flat on the surface, watching the door.

He had quickly learned the rhythms of the place. The buzzers, the announcements, the measured footsteps of guards making their rounds. He knew which doors opened with a heavy clunk and which produced a shrill electronic buzz. He knew the particular silence that fell over a room when an officer entered, and the way every conversation seemed to shrink beneath the weight of institutional authority.

Less than three weeks left to go.

His release date had become the one fixed point in a life that had steadily narrowed around him. He had counted the months, then the weeks, then the days. He had gone over the date so many times in his mind that it felt less like a mark on a calendar and more like a promise he had been forced to make himself. Every morning brought him one day closer. Every night, lying awake in his cell with the stale air and the distant sounds of men moving through the tiers, he reminded himself that he had nearly made it.

He knew his sentence. He knew what the court had ordered and what he still owed. Getting out of prison wasn’t the same as getting his life back, and he wasn’t stupid enough to pretend otherwise. His release would come with conditions, and his probation would place another set of limits on his freedom. His behavior would matter. Every violation, every poor decision, every moment of losing control could jeopardize the future he was so desperate to reclaim.

Then there was the money.

The embezzlement had left a massive debt behind, a financial wreckage that didn’t disappear just because he had served his time. He would be expected to pay it back, and the balance was large enough to haunt him long after the prison doors opened. He could resent the courts, blame the people who had turned against him, and rage about how his life had fallen apart, but none of that would erase the numbers attached to his name.

He had spent enough time in here to understand that his punishment wouldn’t end on release day. The walls would be gone, but the restrictions would follow him. He would have to watch his conduct, meet his obligations, and find a way to rebuild a life burdened by the consequences of his own crimes.

He was tired of the gray walls, the hard bunks, the endless noise, and the feeling that even the smallest part of his day belonged to someone else. Tired of being watched, ordered around, and treated as though his name had been replaced by a number.

Still, less than three weeks.

He held on to that thought as the door opened again, letting in another brief gust of colder air from the corridor.

Soon, he would be out.

What waited for him beyond those walls was another problem. For now, he only had to make it to the date he’d spent so long counting down.

When Cheryl walked into the visitor lounge, Vernon noticed her stomach before he noticed anything else.

The curve beneath her blouse was unmistakable. Not a trick of the fabric, not an unflattering fold, not something he could explain away if he stared long enough. It was the unmistakable shape of a pregnancy, and the sight of it seemed to drain the air from his lungs.

He went still.

For a moment, the noise of the lounge seemed to recede behind the pounding of his own pulse. The buzzing fluorescent lights, the scrape of plastic chairs, the low murmur of conversations around them—all of it faded into something distant and irritatingly irrelevant.

Cheryl was pregnant.

His wife was pregnant.

And he knew damn well the child wasn’t his.

She approached without hurrying, carrying herself with a composure that only made the sight of her more infuriating. She looked well. Better than well, in fact. There was a brightness to her face that prison visits had rarely brought with them before, and she moved with the quiet confidence of someone who had made peace with a decision.

Vernon hated that most of all.

Cheryl pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. She placed her purse on the floor beside her feet, smoothed her blouse over her stomach, and folded her hands in her lap. There was no nervous fidgeting, no anxious glance toward the guard stationed against the far wall, no sign that she was bracing herself for the argument he could already feel building inside him.

Around them, the other visits continued. A couple spoke in hushed voices at the next table. A young child sat coloring on a sheet of paper while an adult tried to keep her occupied. Somewhere behind Vernon, a chair scraped across the floor, followed by a guard’s curt reminder to keep the noise down.

Ordinary little moments. Ordinary family business.

Vernon could barely comprehend any of it.

His gaze remained fixed on Cheryl’s stomach. He searched her face for some sign that this was a joke, a misunderstanding, some elaborate attempt to provoke him. She offered him nothing. No apology. No explanation. Not even the strained smile she sometimes wore when trying to smooth over one of his moods.

His throat felt tight.

“How far along?”

“Four months,” Cheryl replied.

Four months.

He did the arithmetic automatically, counting backward through the weeks and dates. There was no uncertainty to cling to, no convenient gap in the timeline. The answer only confirmed what the shape of her stomach had already told him.

His eyes dropped to it again.

“Is it his?”

Cheryl didn’t look away.

“Yes.”

The single word landed between them and stayed there.

Vernon’s jaw flexed. A muscle jumped in his cheek as he fought to contain the anger rising through him. He was aware of the people around them, of the guards, of the rules that governed every minute of these visits. He had spent enough time behind bars to understand that making a scene would accomplish nothing except giving the officers another reason to pay attention to him.

So he leaned forward instead, lowering his voice until it was little more than a harsh whisper.

“You let that black bastard knock you up.”

Cheryl didn’t flinch. She didn’t glance around to see who might have heard him, either. She simply held his gaze, her expression steady and almost painfully calm.

“I did.”

The lack of shame in her answer seemed to enrage him more than a denial would have. He had expected excuses, perhaps some weak attempt to justify herself. He had expected her to recognize that she had done something he considered unforgivable.

Instead, she sat across from him as though the matter had already been settled.

“You were supposed to wait.” His fingers pressed against the tabletop. “We had an agreement.”

“We still do,” she said calmly.

He stared at her.

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m not posting anything online. I’m not talking to lawyers about divorce papers in public. I came to tell you myself.”

Each sentence was delivered evenly, without emphasis or threat. Cheryl wasn’t raising her voice. She wasn’t trying to humiliate him in front of the other visitors. If anything, she seemed determined to give him the same privacy she would have offered anyone else discussing a difficult family matter.

Somehow, that made it worse.

She was treating him with courtesy, not deference. There was a difference, and Vernon could feel it even if he refused to acknowledge it.

His hands curled slowly into fists against the laminate. He could feel the rough edge of a scratch beneath one knuckle, the hard tabletop pressing into his palms. He wanted to demand answers, to force her to explain how she could sit there so peacefully while telling him something that had just shattered whatever remained of his expectations.

But the guards were watching. The other families were talking. The whole miserable room continued around them as though his life hadn’t just shifted beneath his feet.

Vernon leaned closer, his expression hardening as he struggled to keep his voice under control.

“Tell me what, exactly?”

“The current state of your family at home, of course.”

Vernon stared at her as though she had just said something incomprehensible. His gaze kept drifting back to the curve of her stomach, to the unmistakable evidence of a life that had been growing while his own life sat suspended behind prison walls.

“I knew he was after Skye,” he said at last. His voice was low, strained, and edged with the kind of anger that had been building for months without anywhere to go. “I figured he was fucking her. I hated it, but I could understand it. She was interested in him, he was interested in her. I didn’t like it, but I could see how it happened.”

He swallowed, his jaw working as he struggled to keep his voice down.

“Then I caught him turning my son into a goddamn faggot.”

The word came out with all the ugliness of his original reaction. He was loud enough to attract eyes around him. For a moment, his expression hardened, but then something flickered behind his eyes. Shame, perhaps. Or the uncomfortable memory of everything he had thought and done in the aftermath.