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Jacob’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it. “I’m not trying to confuse you. I just wanted to say goodbye. I have to leave for a while and I wanted you to know I loved you.”

“If you have to go, just go, Howard,” she snapped, ripping her hands away from him. “I don’t need you coming here and messing with my head. You were always mean to me. Always! Get out! My boy will take care of me. He loves me.”

While Jacob knew his mother became agitated when confronted about her dementia, he’d never seen her like this. Was it because he told her he was leaving? Because once he was gone she wouldn’t have any family left to visit her? He feared it was, that on some level she knew he wasn’t Howard and that once he left Chicago she would be alone.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to go away forever, he told himself. Maybe once things settled down, he could come back to visit her. Either way, he had to see his plan through. It would be as good for her as it would for him.

She pointed to the door. “Go!”

Jacob got up and grabbed his jacket. Standing by the door, he said one last time, “Mom, I love you.”

“You’re not my son, Howard! Go!”

Jacob left. He heard his mother call him a jerk after he closed the door. It hurt, but he convinced himself she didn’t mean it. Then, on the way to the elevator, he pulled his phone out of his pocket to see who had called. The number was not one he recognized, and the caller hadn’t left a message. Jacob didn’t return calls from people he didn’t know.

As he departed the hospital, ready to put the last steps of his plan into motion, he didn’t realize that when he’d pulled his phone out of his pocket, something else had come with it: an ID he’d transferred from suit pants to jeans without thinking, an ID he should have gotten rid of days ago but hadn’t.

Anita Watson

Anita made her way past the guard post and parked in a fenced lot. The Redwood Penitentiary was three stories, with guard towers at each corner of the property. From those towers, armed men surveyed the prison grounds.

She emptied the pockets of her leather jacket into a small plastic bin, then went through the metal detector. Eventually, she was directed to one of a dozen booths that had a phone built into the steel partition dividing her station from the next.

She sat on the stool, hands in her lap.

A minute later, Julia Santora appeared on the other side of a large plexiglass window. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit. Her matted black hair didn’t look as if it had been combed in weeks. She was skinny—too skinny, Anita thought—and when she sat it was more like she collapsed.

When Anita had arrived, the three stories of barred windows and razor wire had hardly registered. This was not her home, would never be her home, and she wasn’t worried that the women housed here could be a threat with the bars between them. Perhaps because of that it wasn’t until she saw Elise’s cellmate that she realized how hard this place must be. The guilt she felt for not doing more to help her sister compounded.

Julia picked up the phone and Anita mirrored the action. “What do you want?” Julia asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about Elise.”

“Yeah? What for?”

“I’m her sister. I wanted to find out—”

“She didn’t tell me she had no sister,” Julia looked bemused. “She must not have liked you, huh?”

Anita wasn’t sure she believed Julia, but quickly decided it didn’t matter. Julia didn’t care about Elise’s relationship with her sister. She was trying to find out how much control she could exert over the conversation. To what end, though? Perhaps Julia pushed everyone she met, poking and prodding to find out who was weak, who could be manipulated.

Anita refused to take the bait. “Do you know anybody who might have had a problem with Elise?” she asked.

“If I tell you, what are you going to do for me?”

Anita recognized the question as another attempt to take control of the conversation. Well, if that’s the way she wanted to play it, so be it. “What do you want?”

Julia frowned. “Two hundred dollars. Put it in my commissary account and then we’ll talk.”

“One hundred. And you tell me now.”

Julia considered the offer, shrugged. “There was a girl over on Block C who didn’t like her much. Called her a princess and shit like that because she thought Elise acted like she was too good for Redwood. And you know something? She was right. I didn’t say it to nobody because I had to live with her and I didn’t want her stink getting on me, but that girl of yours was always talking about how she was going to turn her life around when she got out of here, how she was going to make something of herself. As if.”

“Did the girl on Block C get out?”

“No way. That bitch has got another three years or something.”

Anita shifted in her seat, disappointed. She was certain she was on to something for a second. “Was there anybody else she talked about? Someone on the outside?”

“Not that I can think of. There was this one woman writing her letters. I found one of them tucked up under her pillow. As far as I know, that was the only contact she had with the outside world. Nobody ever came to see her. I guess she was about as well liked out there as she was in here.”

“Do you know what they talked about?”

“Some shit about church retreats and books. It’s what got Elise reading all that psychology crap from the prison library. That’s what she called it, anyway. Psychology. Those books looked more like self-help garbage to me. I didn’t pay any of it too much attention. It was all