“It’s debilitating.” Nadia finally turns and looks at me. Her face is expressionless, so bland that I suddenly doubt what I’ve been thinking. Maybe her speech is exactly as she’s presenting it; a list of horrific after-effects from a two-night ordeal.
She could be in counselling for all I know. Presenting the same blank mask to a psychologist while she recounts our time together as a horror movie instead of a love story.
Perhaps the only person I’m fooling is myself.
“My life will never be the same.”
She presses her hand to her abdomen, showing a rotund bump that didn’t exist before. I stare at it, then back up to her face in time to catch her eyes dancing, then a smile beams out, solely for me.
There and then gone. Wiped away as she turns back to the judge.
“Thank you for the opportunity to speak.” She folds her papers and returns to her seat, face set back into its mask.
Am I crazy? I’m not crazy.
Am I?
She doesn’t look at me again for the rest of the hearing. After we break for lunch, she doesn’t return. My sentence gets extended, and I can barely concentrate on the length because I’m still hopeful to see her again.
The wait at the holding cells is bad but at least I have the transition from the courthouse to the prison van to look forward to. Once that’s over, without a glimpse, I settle back against the seat, hope warring with hopelessness and nothing I can do about either.
Over the following fortnight, the excitement I felt during the sentencing slowly evaporates. It becomes easier to believe that I read something into the situation that just didn’t exist; that I shaped the words into a meaning they were never meant to carry.
Then at dinner, one of Josh’s goons invites me to join him. His eyes are scathing, his lip curling with disgust. A shot of genuine fear runs through me. I can take him in a fight but there’s no way I can take all of them.
He waves me into a seat opposite and I accept the position warily. It’s not lost on me that the nearest corrections officer also takes a keener interest than usual in our table, hovering, back stiffened ready for trouble.
“Heard you got ten added to your stretch.”
I nod, carefully avoiding eye contact. The figure’s a little higher but it’s concurrent with what I’m serving, so it shakes out close enough to not be worth the contradiction.
My eye muscles ache from trying to catch all movements from my peripheral vision. The rest of my body aches from holding it so tense, all to display my musculature so nobody underestimates the fight they’d have on their hands.
Josh drums his fingers on the table, the repetition winding me up in less than a minute.
“You got something else to say?” I eventually ask, weighing up the loss in stature by being first to break the silence with the need to get the fuck out of his sights before I implode.
“Not me.” He sniffs, hitching up his pants and grinning at me like I’m supper.
Idiot. Right now, the only part of his parentage shining through must belong to his father because there’s not a trace of Nadia in sight. No kindness. No snappy witticisms. No defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.
Just the grin on his face that makes the skin on my back crawl.
“Yeah? Well, tell your mother I said hi.”
I don’t get to my feet before he lunges across the table, bunching my shirt in his fist, the officer behind him drawing a baton, advancing until he’s barely a foot away.
“You want to be careful how you talk about my mother.”
I return his stare, suddenly exhausted. Prison was never my favourite place but the thought it’ll be a decade before I can shake off its omnipresent gloom grinds me down. I’d almost welcome the fight just to ease the tension. To explode so I can get down to the task of putting whatever’s left back together.
“I’m always careful how I talk about Nadia,” I reply through gritted teeth. “I adore her.”
The henchman to Josh’s right suddenly decides it’s a good point in the conversation to chuckle. The fist holding me disappears and Josh steps back, letting another of his flanking army handle the situation before the guards jump into the fray, pulling the man apart.
“Get yourself on kitchen duty next roster,” he says, shuffling away before he does something that means the entire room gets confined to their cells for the rest of the day. “We’ll take care of the rest.”
He gets half the room away, then swings around and walks back to me. His eyes have the same amber glow as his mother, though his are muddy, where hers are gemstones, catching and refracting the light.
