I rubbed my face, overwhelmed with a desire to lay my head down on the table and cry my heart out. Everything I’d been doing seemed so futile, ever since the night I’d stopped to help Nicola Aguinaldo. My career was in shambles, I was demoralized from my weeks in Coolis, I didn’t know any more than I had a month ago about why BB Baladine was gunning for me.

“Yeah, tell Freeman to bail me out. I don’t have much time left in here before everything comes unglued for me in here, anyway. Everyone on the jail side knows I speak English, that I was even writing legal letters for some of the women. It won’t be long until that word gets over to the creep who runs the clothes shop, and then I’ll—well, the best–case scenario is I’ll be assigned back to the kitchen.”

“Vic, I don’t know whether you’re heartbreakingly gallant or only out of your mind, but you’re worth a dozen of Alex Fisher, with her stock options thrown in besides. Don’t do anything too foolish before Freeman can post bail.” His lips brushed the back of my hand and he was gone.

CO Polsen wasn’t on duty; the woman guard patted me down in a perfunctory way and sent me to my cell to be counted before dinner. I brushed the back of my hand against my cheek. I had one last chance to learn something tangible at Coolis. I don’t know if it was gallantry or insanity that was driving me, but the only plan that came to me made me so cold that I lay shivering under my blanket while Solina and her friends marched in formation to the dining hall.

Chapter 41: Photo Op

41 Photo Op

In the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote a letter to Lotty. A light in the corridor came through the grated window at the top of our door, projecting a small grid of light on the wall behind our toilet, enough for me to make out the shape of my words on the page without being able to read them.

I wanted Lotty to know how important she’d always been to me, since my student days at the University of Chicago when I’d been not only young but rawly unsophisticated. She took me under her wing and taught me basic social skills I’d missed growing up in a rough neighborhood with a dying mother. Somehow over the years she’d moved from being a kind of fulfillment of my mother to a more equal friend, but she’d never lost her importance for me.