18
CONCRETE CONFESSIONAL
DOMINIC
Iwent to the prison alone — not because I had to, but because some conversations belonged in the dark.
HMP Wakefield. Category A, high security, where they caged men society had already condemned as beyond redemption. I parked in the visitors' lot and sat there for ten minutes with my hands gripping the wheel hard enough to make my knuckles white, trying to remember why I'd thought this was a good idea. Trying to convince myself I could walk into that building without destroying something.
Cal's folder sat on the passenger seat — photocopies of documents I'd already memorised, evidence that painted a picture so different from the one I'd believed for three years that accepting it meant admitting I'd failed Lily twice. Once by not protecting her. Again by not questioning the narrative that buried her.
I grabbed the folder, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance with steps that felt heavier than they should.
The building was designed to break you before you even reached whoever you'd come to see. All concrete and steel,windows too small and too high, doors that locked behind you with sounds that echoed like coffins closing — the architecture of control, of power asserted through every ugly inch of space. Inside smelled like industrial cleaner and decades of human misery compressed into air that tasted metallic. A guard at the desk looked up with the particular boredom of someone who'd processed thousands of visitors and stopped seeing them as individuals years ago.
“Name and prisoner number,” he said without preamble.
I gave him both, watched him type slowly while he checked databases and verified I wasn't on some list that would bar me entry. My record was clean enough. No arrests, no convictions. Just a man visiting family.
Family. The word tasted like ash.
“Empty your pockets. Remove your belt, shoes, watch. Any metal on you goes in the tray.”
I complied, stripped myself of everything that made me feel human, and stood in my socks on cold linoleum while another guard ran a metal detector wand over my body with invasive thoroughness — checked my mouth, made me lift my arms, turn around, patted me down with hands that pressed too hard and lingered too long. This was the first layer, the deliberate stripping of dignity, the reminder that here you had no power, no rights, just permission granted and revocable at any moment.
They stamped my hand with UV ink. I watched it sink into my skin and thought about how many times Ethan had been marked and sorted and catalogued in the ways that erased whatever he'd been before this place claimed him.
“Through there. Wait for escort.”
I walked through doors that locked automatically behind me, down a corridor painted institutional grey, past cells I tried not to look into, past men in orange jumpsuits who watched from behind eyes that had forgotten how to hope for anything beyondthe next meal or the next day without violence. Every step felt like walking deeper into something I couldn't come back from.
The escort was a woman in her forties who'd perfected the art of looking through people rather than at them. She led me through three more locked doors, each one taking me further into the machine, until we reached the visiting area.
Rows of plastic tables. Phones mounted on walls with scratched protective glass between prisoners and visitors. No contact allowed, no physical touch, just voices transmitted through lines that were probably monitored and definitely recorded.
Ethan was already waiting.
Three years changes a man, especially three years in a place like this. His hair had gone grey at the temples, lines carved around his eyes that hadn't been there before, bruising on his knuckles that suggested he'd been fighting — or being fought. But his posture was still upright, still holding onto something that might have been dignity or might have been defiance.
He looked up when I sat down. Our eyes met through the glass and I saw him flinch, his whole body pulling taut with a fear he controlled in the space of a second.
Good. He should be afraid.
I dropped the folder on the table, picked up the phone, and waited.
He hesitated, his hand hovering over the receiver as though touching it would commit him to something he wasn't ready for.
“Pick it up,” I said. Flat and dangerous.
He did, slowly, the way you lift something that might bite. “Dominic.” His voice came through tinny and careful. “I didn't think you'd?—”
“Tell me what happened to Lily.” The words came out as a growl. “Not the version you told the police. Not the version that got you convicted. The truth. Now.”
Ethan's jaw clenched. “Dom, I?—”
“Don't.” I pressed my hand flat against the glass hard enough to make it creak. “Don't lie to me. Don't waste my time with denials or whatever story you've been telling yourself to sleep at night. I've spent three years believing you killed my sister. Three years hating you with everything I had. And now I've got evidence suggesting maybe that was exactly what someone wanted me to believe.”
I pulled the first document from the folder and pressed it against the glass so he could see it clearly.
