Chapter 19 - The Shadow of Five Years
Five years passed like a swift,
cleansing river over the landscape of New York.
The year was 2031,
and the city moved forward with relentless,
dazzling momentum.
Upstate at the Clinton Correctional Facility,
inside the cold,
echoing cell block,
David sat on his bunk,
his reflection in the polished metal mirror showing a man who looked decades older than his forty years.
His hair was almost entirely grey,
his face lined with deep wrinkles of stress,
and his frame thin and stooped from years of prison rations and hard manual labor.
Every afternoon during recreation hour,
in the crowded common room,
a large television mounted near the ceiling broadcast the daily financial news.
David stood near the back of the room,
his hands tucked into his pocketless trousers,
staring up at the screen.
The news anchor’s voice filled the room:
“And in global corporate news,
the Hayes International Design Conglomerate,
headed by renowned billionaire philanthropist Eleanor Hayes,”
“has just signed a historic two-hundred-million-dollar urban preservation agreement in Paris.”
The screen displayed a high-definition video of me walking down the steps of the Palais Garnier in Paris,
wearing a stunning emerald dress,
surrounded by international dignitaries,
radiating authority,
grace,
and immense fortune.
David stared at the image,
his throat dry,
his heart aching with a hollow,
unbearable agony that no prison sentence could match.
He realized with absolute,
brutal clarity that while he had spent five years locked behind iron bars,
scrubbing floors,
eating cold stew,
and wearing rough canvas,
I had conquered the world.
Every single day he had spent in prison was a day I had spent building an empire.
He had thought he was leaving me behind in a kitchen;
instead,
he had cast himself into a abyss while I soared to heights he could never even dream of reaching.
In Queens,
Arthur had passed away two years prior in a state-run nursing home,
buried in a simple,
unmarked municipal plot.
Teresa lived alone in a tiny,
subsidized studio apartment on the outer edges of the borough,
her days spent sitting by a small window,
watching buses pass by,
completely forgotten by the world she had once tried so hard to impress.
When she occasionally called the prison to speak to David,
their conversations were brief,
hollow,
and filled with long,
painful silences,
because neither of them had anything left to say.
The lie that David had constructed on that rain-soaked night outside JFK Airport had consumed his parents,
May you like
destroyed his youth,
and erased his name from polite society forever.
