Chapter 14 - The Visitation at Walpole
Three weeks after the arraignment, the autumn leaves had completely fallen from the trees.
The Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole stood like a gray concrete fortress against a bleak November sky.
Razor wire gleamed on top of twenty-foot concrete walls, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter watchtowers.
I sat alone in a private, windowless attorney-client visitation room in the maximum-security wing.
The room smelled of floor wax, industrial bleach, and ancient despair.
A heavy steel table was bolted to the concrete floor, separating two metal chairs.
The door on the prisoner side clicked, and the heavy electronic lock slid back with a loud clank.
A guard escorted Vivien into the room.
She had lost twenty pounds in three weeks.
Her collarbones protruded sharply beneath her drab orange prison uniform, and her skin had the dull, grayish hue of fluorescent lights and confinement.
Her hair had been cut short to comply with facility regulations, exposing the sharp, hollow angles of her face.
The guard secured her ankle cuffs to the steel floor ring, gave me a brief nod, and stepped outside, leaving the observation window clear.
Vivien sat down slowly, her chains clinking against the steel tabletop.
She looked at me across the barrier, her eyes devoid of the fire they had held in the courtroom.
All that remained was a cold, bitter emptiness.
"Did you come to gloat, Lorenzo?" she asked, her voice raspy from disuse.
"Or did you come to check on your investment before the state puts me away forever?"
I rested my hands flat on the steel surface, keeping my voice quiet and measured.
"I didn't come to gloat, Vivien."
"I came to deliver a message from my mother."
A sharp, involuntary twitch pulled at the corner of Vivien’s mouth.
"Your mother is dead."
"She is dead because of you," I replied evenly.
"But before she died, she wrote a final entry in her personal diary."
"She wrote about the tea you brought her on the balcony."
"She wrote that she felt sorry for you."
Vivien let out a harsh, dry laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping over stone.
"Sorry for me?" she mocked, leaning forward against her chains.
"The great Isabella Duca pitied me?"
"Why?"
"Because she knew you were an empty vessel, Vivien," I said, looking straight into her dead eyes.
"You had intelligence, beauty, education, and access to the highest corridors of influence in the country."
"Yet you chose to use those gifts to murder an old woman and terrorize a three-year-old child."
"You traded your soul for maritime stocks and a title you didn't even understand."
Vivien’s face twisted into an ugly, sneering mask.
"You don't know what it's like to grow up in that family, Lorenzo!" she hissed, her voice trembling with suppressed rage.
"My father was a bankrupt degenerate who used me as collateral for his debts!"
"Every dinner party was an auction!"
"Every gala was an audition to find a rich husband who could keep us from being thrown out onto the street!"
"I had to be ruthless!"
"If I wasn't ruthless, the world would have chewed me up and spat me out!"
"Elena grew up in an orphanage in the mountains of West Virginia," I told her, my voice cutting through her excuses like a steel blade.
"She had no pedigree, no trust fund, and no powerful father."
"She worked sixteen hours a day cleaning floors to feed her daughter."
"Yet when you offered her money and threatened her life, she chose her honor over your millions."
"She had nothing, and she remained human."
"You had everything, and you turned into a monster."
Vivien stared at me, the sneer slowly dying on her lips.
For the first time since I had known her, the defensive armor she had worn her entire life completely failed.
A deep, hollow realization crept into her eyes—the realization that she had destroyed herself not because of survival, but because of vanity.
"Julian took the plea deal," she whispered, her voice barely audible.
"He's testifying against me next month."
"My own father."
"Julian Vance is a coward," I said plainly.
"You knew that when you partnered with him."
"You chose to swim with sharks, Vivien, and now you are bleeding in their water."
Vivien looked down at her handcuffed wrists, watching a single tear slide off her chin and splash onto the cold steel table.
"What happens to the estate?" she asked in a tiny, broken voice.
"What happens to the room in the west wing?"
"The west wing has already been remodeled," I told her.
"Elena and Mia live there now."
"The room where you threatened to murder a child is now Mia's playroom."
"She has her wooden blocks and her dolls sitting right where you stood in your pale green silk."
Vivien flinched as if I had struck her across the face.
The image of the maid's daughter playing freely in the grand mansion she had killed to possess was the ultimate, poetic punishment.
She buried her face in her handcuffed palms, her shoulders heaving with silent, agonizing sobs.
I stood up from the steel chair.
I didn't feel hatred toward her anymore.
I felt only the cold, solemn satisfaction of justice completed.
"Goodbye, Vivien," I said, knocking on the observation window for the guard to unlock the door.
"I hope the walls in this place are thick enough to keep out the sound of your own conscience."
May you like
I walked out of the room as the electronic lock slammed shut behind me.
Behind that steel door, the woman who had almost conquered the house of Duca was left with nothing but the echo of her chains and the silence of a life thrown away.
