Chapter 34
Emmaline
The visiting room always seemed like it was designed to squeeze the breath out of people.
Too bright, too cold, too loud with the hum of fluorescent lights that cast everything in harsh, unforgiving shadows.
The scent of industrial bleach clung to the walls like a desperate attempt to mask what lay beneath—something stale and defeated, like coffee left burning on a burner for hours, or hope going rancid in the recycled air.
I sat at the same scratched metal table I always did, the one with the deep gouge near the corner that someone had carved with their fingernail or perhaps something sharper.
I tried to smooth my palms against the cold surface as if that could somehow steady my nerves, but the metal seemed to leach the warmth right out of my skin.
The other families scattered around the room spoke in hushed, urgent voices—a wife clutching tissues, a mother bouncing a crying baby, an elderly man whose hands shook as he reached across to touch his son’s fingers.
Each table held its own small tragedy, its own desperate hope.
I’d been coming here for nine years now, and I still felt like an intruder in their grief.
When the inner door buzzed and swung open with its familiar mechanical groan, Wesley stepped through.
His shoulders were drawn tight beneath the orange jumpsuit, and his jaw was clenched so hard I could see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
He scanned the room once with those careful, watchful eyes that prison had taught him, cataloguing exits and threats before he spotted me and made his way over.
Even after all these years, even in this purgatory, I felt the same rush of relief when he lowered himself into the chair across from me.
Alive. In one piece. Still my little brother, despite everything this place had tried to take from him.
“Hey.” I tried to put warmth in the word, the kind of warmth that used to come so easily between us when we were kids sneaking cookies from Gran’s cooling racks. But my throat was dry as sand, and I wasn’t sure it carried. “I’ve got good news.”
He didn’t answer right away, just waited with those flat, guarded eyes that had replaced the bright ones I remembered. Not a good sign. In the old days, Wesley would have leaned forward, eager for whatever I had to share. Now he sat back like he was bracing for impact.
Had something happened since my last visit?
Was the hearing delayed? Cancelled? Surely Bodie would have told me if there’d been a change to the schedule.
He’d promised to keep me informed of anything that might affect Wesley’s case, and despite everything between our families, despite the complicated mess our marriage had become, I believed he meant it.
“Roxie sent her letter last week,” I began, leaning forward with the kind of enthusiasm I hadn’t had in months.
“Ben too. Aunt Viv mailed hers Monday. You know how she is with the postal service. Wants to make sure everything gets there with time to spare. Aunt Loretta brought me hers to proof before she sent it, made me read it twice to check for spelling.” The memory of my aunt’s careful cursive, the way she’d agonized over every word, brought a small smile to my lips. “And they aren’t the only ones, Wes.”
I searched his face for some flicker of the hope I was trying so hard to kindle. “You’ve got the almost whole family behind you this time, Wesley. The whole community. Everyone wants to see you home where you belong. I think this hearing could finally go differently.”
For a heartbeat—just one precious moment—his mouth softened, and I saw something that looked like the brother who used to help me frost birthday cakes and steal extra frosting when Gran wasn’t looking.
Then he shook his head, sharp enough to slice through whatever fragile optimism I’d been building.
“Don’t.”
The word hit me like cold water. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t sugarcoat it.” His voice carried an edge that cut straight through me, through all my careful hopes and the speech I’d practiced on the drive over. “I know what’s going on.”
My stomach dropped so fast I went dizzy. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen the pictures.”
Confusion tangled with dread in my chest, forming a knot that made it hard to breathe. “What pictures?”
“Mom brought them.” He leaned forward across the scarred table, his voice dropping to that low, dangerous register I remembered from when we were kids and he was about to pick a fight he couldn’t win.
The words came out rough as gravel, like they’d been scraped raw against his throat.
“You and him. Holding hands like some kind of fairy tale couple. Smiling at each other. Sucking face in public. Acting like you’re head over heels in love.
Don’t sit there and act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. ”
The floor tilted under me, as if the whole sterile room had shifted on its axis.
My mind raced, trying to place when someone might have been watching me and Bodie, photographing us.
Had it been at the town meeting? Walking to the bakery?
That afternoon when Bodie had surprised me with lunch and we’d sat on one of the benches in the story garden?
“She’s been—what? Following me around town?
Taking pictures like some kind of private investigator?
” The confusion gave way to horror and a creeping sense of violation that made my skin crawl. “Why would she do that?”
“Of you and Bodie Gibson.” He bit out my husband’s name like poison on his tongue.
“You married him, Emma, and now you’re parading around town like it’s some kind of perfect love story, like you’re living in a damn romance novel.
You chose him. You chose the Gibsons and their blood money and their guilty consciences.
Over me. Over your own flesh and blood.”
“That’s not fair.” The words snapped out sharper than I’d meant them to, loud enough that the guard by the door glanced our way with a warning look.
I lowered my voice but couldn’t soften the edge.
“It isn’t like that, Wesley. I explained the situation with Gran’s will when I was here last time. And things have changed since then.”
“Changed how?” His voice rose despite my attempt to keep things quiet, echoing off the cinderblock walls until one of the guards took a step closer, hand moving to his radio.
Wesley noticed and dropped the volume, but the anger stayed, radiating from him like heat.
“Explain it to me, Emma. Make me understand how my sister ended up married and happy with the man who destroyed our family. Don’t stand there and tell me he loves you.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is real.
He’s not with you because of who you are, because you’re smart and kind and deserve the world.
He’s doing this for his own reasons, his own agenda.
And none of it has anything to do with loving you.
“You want to believe it does.” He pushed back from the table, the chair scraping against the concrete floor with a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“But it’s not true, and deep down you know it.
He put me in here, Emma. He looked me in the eye and slapped those handcuffs on my wrists and walked me to that patrol car while half the town watched.
Don’t think for one second he’s forgotten which family we belong to. ”
Something in me snapped like a taut wire finally giving way under too much pressure.
I leaned forward across the scarred metal table, my voice trembling but sharp as broken glass.
“No, Wes. You put yourself here. You made a choice that night—the wrong one, even if you made it for the right reasons. You knew the risks, knew what could happen, and you did it anyway because you thought they’d try you as a minor if you got caught. ”
The words tasted foul on my tongue, but I forced them out, each one a small betrayal of the loyalty I’d carried for him my entire life.
“Bodie was just doing his job when he arrested you. He didn’t have a choice—there were witnesses, evidence.
If it had been anyone else wearing that badge, the outcome would have been exactly the same. ”
I swallowed hard, my throat tight with unshed tears and words I’d been carrying for years without acknowledgement.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting harsh shadows across Wesley’s face as I continued.
“And if you want the parole board to actually let you out this time instead of denying you again, you’re going to have to own that.
Take real responsibility for your actions, not just go through the motions.
Show them you understand the weight of what you did.
That’s what they’re looking for, Wes. That’s the only way this cycle ends differently. ”
His eyes widened like I’d reached across the table and struck him with my open palm.
For one fleeting heartbeat, the mask slipped completely away, and he looked absolutely gutted—raw and vulnerable and so much like the little brother I remembered from before everything went wrong.
The brother who used to sneak into my room during thunderstorms, who once punched Bobby Hartwell for calling me names in middle school, even though he’d only been in fourth grade at the time.
Then the shutters slammed down with almost audible force, anger flaring bright and hot to cover the hurt bleeding through his features.
“There it is.” The bitterness in his words was so thick I could practically taste it in the stale prison air.
“You’ve chosen him over your own blood. Don’t you dare try to tell me different, Emma.
Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending this is about justice or responsibility or any of that bullshit. ”
This was what Marla and Karen had been up to during all these weeks of apparent quiet. Taking photos, making visits here to my brother, sowing the seeds of dissension to turn him against me. Destroying the most important familial relationship I had as revenge.
“Wesley.” I reached out across the table, desperate to grab hold of him with words if not with hands, to pull him back from whatever cliff he was walking toward.
“Listen to me. Please. Things have been different lately. Bodie and I have been trying to put an end to this stupid feud, to make things better between the families. Maybe once you’re out, when you’re home where you belong—”
He stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor with finality.
“You’re lying to yourself if you think this is about love.
It isn’t. He arrested me, Em. Jacked up my whole damned life.
Don’t fool yourself into believing a man who did that suddenly turned around and married you because of his feelings.
He’s in this for reasons of his own, and none of them are you. ”
He turned away before I could respond, signaling the guard with a sharp gesture that spoke of almost a decade’s worth of practice.
He didn’t look back at me as he walked toward the inner door, his shoulders rigid with anger and something that looked like disappointment.
I sat there, frozen in my chair, staring at the place he’d been, my heart thudding so hard I was sure he could see it in my fingertips, in my temples, in the hollow of my throat.
I told myself he was just angry, just scared about the upcoming hearing, just repeating the poison that Marla had been pouring into his ears during her visits.
But the truth was sharper than that, cutting through my attempts at rationalization.
I’d wounded him too. I’d forced him to confront what he didn’t want to admit—that he hadn’t been some innocent victim dragged into this prison against his will.
That he’d made a choice, a series of choices, that had led him here.
And if he wanted the parole board to give him another chance at freedom, he had to acknowledge those choices out loud, take ownership of them.
I hadn’t been wrong to push him toward that truth.
But the way his face had shuttered when I’d pressed, the way he’d looked at me like I’d betrayed him in the worst possible way, left me hollowed out and scraped raw inside.
His words kept circling back, like vultures picking at old wounds that had never quite healed.
Don’t fool yourself. He’s not with you because of who you are.
He hadn’t called me unlovable outright. He hadn’t said what Marla always had, hadn’t thrown those particular knives with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to aim for maximum damage.
But sitting there in that sterile visiting room with the stink of industrial bleach burning my nose and the relentless hum of the fluorescent lights drilling into my ears, it felt exactly the same.
That familiar, crushing weight of being told I was too cold, too stubborn, too much trouble to ever be truly wanted for anything more than convenience or calculation.
I wanted to believe Bodie loved me. I did believe it in the quiet moments between us—when he’d trace lazy patterns across my bare shoulder in the early morning light, when he’d catch my eye across a crowded room and smile like I was the only person who mattered, when he’d hold me close after we’d made love and whisper my name like it was something sacred.
In those stolen moments, the Gibson-Maddox feud seemed like ancient history, and the way he looked at me made me feel like I was worth more than all the bitter blood between our families.
But now, Wesley’s voice had twined with my mother’s in the back of my mind, creating a chorus of doubt that grew louder with each passing second. They whispered that I was only ever convenient, never truly wanted.
I folded my hands tight in my lap to keep them from shaking, my knuckles going white with the effort.
The fluorescent lights above seemed to buzz louder, casting harsh shadows across the visiting room that made everything feel stark and unforgiving.
For the first time in months, I wondered if maybe this whole fragile, precious thing I’d been building with Bodie was nothing more than a story I’d let myself believe.
A pretty fairy tale about love conquering all, when the truth might be far simpler and infinitely more painful.