My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Visiting Table

Laurel answers everything except why, knows what he said on days he never told anyone, and his hand on her jaw finds a racing pulse; then a guard says the family's lawyer asked she go in with the general inmates.

The visiting room at the county jail had one steel table, two plastic chairs, and a guard by the door.

Laurel was already sitting when they brought me in.

She wore orange now.

The color made her look even thinner, and her short hair stood up on one side.

She looked at my face for a long moment, and I let her.

"You came," she said.

"Don't act like you're glad."

"I'm not glad." She folded her hands on the table. "You should be home eating."

"Why?" I said.

I did not sit down.

"Why did you do it?"

"I told you I won't say."

"You hired men to put me in a cellar."

"Yes."

"For five years."

"One thousand eight hundred and twenty-six days," she said. "The last one was a leap year."

I hit the table with my open hand.

The guard shifted his weight and watched me.

Laurel did not even blink.

"Did you ever think about me?" I said. "Did you ever once picture what I was going through?"

"Every day."

"Liar."

"On day one you shouted for me until your voice went."

She said it quietly, looking straight at me.

"On day two hundred and eleven you sang the school song, all three verses, because it was the only thing you remembered the words to."

I felt the room tilt.

"On day fourteen hundred you stopped asking for me."

I had not told anyone that.

I had not told the police, or my mother, or the paramedic.

"How do you know that?" I said.

"Because I asked every month."

Her voice stayed flat and even.

"I paid on the first, and every first I asked what you'd said."

"You sat there and listened to them tell you how I was breaking."

"Yes."

"And you kept paying."

"Yes."

"Then you're a monster."

"Maybe," Laurel said. "I'm still not telling you why."

Something snapped in my head.

I was around the table before I knew I had moved.

I took her jaw in my hand and tipped her face up to mine.

The guard stepped forward and I did not care.

Her skin was dry and warm.

She did not flinch.

She did not pull back.

She looked up at me with gray eyes that had not changed in five years, and I realized I had never stopped seeing them.

Every night in that cellar, they had been the last thing I saw.

"Say it," I whispered. "Tell me why, or I swear I'll never forgive you."

"You'd never believe me," Laurel said.

My thumb sat against her pulse.

It was going hard and fast under her jaw.

"You told me once I was being paranoid," she said, so softly that only I could hear. "I'm not doing that twice."

"What are you talking about?"

"Sir," the guard said. "Hands off the inmate."

I let go.

My palm was shaking.

My whole body was awake in a way it had not been in five years, hot and tight and furious, and I knew exactly what that meant.

I told myself it was only that nobody had touched me kindly or otherwise in five years.

It was only that I was alive and she was in front of me.

It was not her.

It could not be her.

Laurel touched her own jaw, right where my fingers had been.

Then she looked at my hands, and she knew.

I saw her know it.

"Go home, Nolan," she said. "Eat something."

"Stop telling me to eat!"

"Then stop looking like you're starving."

The guard took me by the arm.

I let him steer me out.

At the door I turned around.

She had not moved.

She was sitting in that plastic chair with her hands folded, watching me go, exactly like she had watched me cross the yard.

Like a woman who had already paid for this moment and was only waiting for the bill.

In the corridor, I leaned my forehead against the cold cinder block and tried to breathe.

I had come for an answer.

All I had was a day count and the feeling of her pulse under my thumb.

"Mr. Thayer?"

The guard from the visiting room had followed me out.

He was older than I had thought, with a gray mustache and a worn-down look.

He glanced down the hall to make sure we were alone.

"It's not my place," he said. "But your family's lawyer called the warden yesterday morning."

"So?"

"He asked that Mrs. Thayer be put in general population."

I frowned.

"She's charged with a kidnapping every camera in the state is watching," the guard said. "A woman like that goes into protective custody. That's standard."

"And?"

"The warden said yes to him."

He rubbed his mustache.

"She's in a cell with two women who've been told she hurt a child."

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