Chapter 9
I stared at the letter for a long time, the red ink bleeding through the paper a little, like she’d pressed down hard when she wrote it.
I tried to brush it off.
She was in prison.
She had no money, no power, no connections left.
She couldn’t do anything.
But I couldn’t shake the cold feeling in my gut.
I called the warden, asking if she’d had any visitors, any phone calls, any access to anything that could let her hurt us.
He said no.
She’d been in solitary confinement for threatening a guard.
No visitors.
No phone calls.
No access to a computer.
She couldn’t do anything.
I tried to forget about it.
I threw the letter in the trash.
But a week later, the first package arrived.
It was delivered to the house, addressed to Mia.
Inside was a brand-new stuffed rabbit, exactly like the one she’d had since she was a baby, the one Elena had thrown in the trash at the penthouse.
Taped to its ear was a small note, written in that same red nail polish:
I’m still watching.
Mia screamed when she saw it, throwing the rabbit across the room, crying that Elena was going to come get her.
I called the police.
They traced the package to a volunteer at the prison’s craft program, who Elena had paid five hundred dollars to mail it, using money she’d smuggled in from another inmate.
The volunteer was fired and charged.
The warden promised to increase security around Elena, to search her cell every day, to make sure she couldn’t send anything else.
But the packages kept coming.
A drawing of Mia sleeping, exactly like the video she’d sent me months before.
A lock of blonde hair, exactly the color of Mia’s.
A small, plastic knife, sharpened to a point, with a note that said Soon.
Each one was sent by a different guard, a different volunteer, a different inmate, all paid off by Elena with the small amount of money she had in her prison account, with promises of more when she got out.
Mia started having nightmares again.
She refused to sleep alone.
She refused to go to school, saying Elena was going to come get her.
I doubled the security again.
I put cameras in every room of the house.
I had men follow Mia everywhere.
But it wasn’t enough.
Three weeks after the first package, I got a call from the school nurse.
Mia had had a severe allergic reaction at lunch.
She’d eaten a cookie that had peanuts in it—she was deathly allergic, had been since she was a baby.
The nurse had given her an EpiPen and called an ambulance.
She was okay, thank god, but it was close.
The police investigated.
They found a woman had posed as a volunteer baker for the school’s bake sale, and had put peanut butter in Mia’s cookie on purpose.
She was an inmate’s sister, paid two thousand dollars by Elena to do it.
That night, I sat in Mia’s hospital room, holding her hand while she slept, and made a decision.
I was done being scared.
I was done reacting.
I was going to end this, once and for all.
The next morning, I put on a suit, and drove three hours to the maximum-security prison where Elena was being held.
I sat across from her in the small, glass visiting booth, a guard standing on either side of her.
She looked smaller, older, her hair gray at the roots, her expensive clothes replaced by a faded orange jumpsuit, her red nails chipped and bare.
But when she saw me, she smiled that same cold, cruel smile I’d come to hate.
“Took you long enough,” she said, her voice scratchy through the phone. “I was starting to think you’d never come visit your old stepmom.”
“What do you want, Elena?” I said, no preamble. “Why are you doing this? You’re in prison for forty-five years. You’re never getting out. Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
She laughed, a sharp, bitter sound.
“Because you took everything from me,” she said, her voice rising, the guard on her left putting a hand on her shoulder to calm her down. “Everything! I had it all. The money. The house. The company. The perfect life. And you took it all. Just like you took your dad’s attention from me the day I married him. You were always there. Always in the way. Always his little princess, while I was just the second wife no one cared about. Well, if I can’t have it all? Neither can you. I’m going to spend every single day of the next forty-five years making your life a living hell. I’m going to pay every guard, every inmate, every visitor I can, to hurt you. To hurt that little brat of yours. I’m never going to stop. Never. You’ll never be safe. She’ll never be safe. Not as long as I’m alive.”
She leaned forward, her face pressed against the glass, her eyes wild.
“And you know what the worst part is?” she whispered. “Your dad knew I hated you. He knew I was mean to you. He knew I didn’t want Mia around. And he still married me. He still chose me, over and over, until the day I killed him. Because he was tired of you. Tired of your mistakes. Tired of being a dad. He only gave you the company because he felt guilty for ignoring you for two years. He never loved you as much as you think he did.”
I sat there, letting her words wash over me, feeling the last of the fear I’d carried for two years melt away.
She was sad.
Pathetic.
A small, bitter woman who’d spent her whole life wanting what other people had, too selfish and cruel to build anything of her own.
She had no power.
Not really.
All she could do was throw rocks from her cell, and hope one of them hit.
I smiled at her, calm and steady.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “Daddy loved me more than anything. And I know that. Mia knows that. Nothing you can say or do will ever change that. And as for you spending the next forty-five years hurting us? That’s not going to happen.”
I signaled to the guard on my side of the glass.
He handed me a thick stack of papers.
I held them up to the glass so Elena could see.
“This is a petition to have you transferred to a supermax prison in Colorado,” I said. “Solitary confinement, twenty-three hours a day. No visitors. No phone calls. No access to craft programs, to money, to other inmates. No way to send letters, or packages, or pay anyone to do anything. You’ll spend the next forty-five years alone in a cell the size of a bathroom. No one will talk to you. No one will see you. You’ll be forgotten. You’ll die alone. And you’ll never, ever be able to hurt me or Mia ever again.”
Elena’s face went white.
She screamed, lunging at the glass, the guards pulling her back, holding her down as she kicked and shrieked curses at me.
“You can’t do this!” she screamed. “You can’t! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill that little brat! I’ll—”
The guards dragged her out of the visiting room, still screaming.
I walked out of the prison into the bright sunshine, taking a deep breath of fresh air, feeling lighter than I had in two years.
The transfer was approved a week later.
Elena was moved to the supermax, no fanfare, no press.
She was gone.
Really gone.
I drove home from the prison, ready to tell Mia it was all over, ready to start our new lives, free of fear.
I pulled into the driveway, and Mia came running out of the house, holding something big and flat behind her back, grinning so wide her cheeks hurt.
“Mommy!” she yelled. “I made you something! For when the bad lady is gone forever! Close your eyes!”
I closed my eyes, smiling.
I heard her set something big against my legs.
“Open!” she said.
I opened my eyes.
It was a drawing.
Big, bigger than any she’d ever made, covered in glitter and sparkles, every color of crayon we owned.
In the middle, under a huge, bright rainbow, were four stick figures holding hands.
Daddy, with angel wings and a big smile.
Me, with my messy bun.
Mia, with her pink ribbons.
And Rosa, Mark, Arthur, and Leo, all standing around us, smiling.
Our family.
The real one.
I knelt down, tears streaming down my face, and pulled her into a hug.
“It’s perfect,” I said, kissing her forehead a hundred times. “The most perfect thing in the whole world.”
That night, we hung the drawing above the fireplace in the living room, right next to the crumpled, coffee-stained one I’d made two years prior, the one Elena had thrown in the trash.
I stood there, looking at the two drawings, Mia’s hand in mine, listening to Mark and Rosa and Arthur laughing in the kitchen, making dinner.
I thought of Elena, alone in her tiny cell, with nothing but her anger and her bitterness to keep her company.
I thought of Daddy, watching over us, proud.
I thought of all the hard days, all the tears, all the fear.
And I knew, without a single doubt, that we were finally safe.
May you like
Finally home.
Finally happy.
