Chapter 17
CHAPTER 18: The Dead Letter
Winter arrived, blanketing the city in a thick layer of snow. The trial of Richard Vance was scheduled for early spring, and the prosecution was methodically building a case that was, by all accounts, impenetrable.
I was sorting through the mail on a Tuesday evening when I saw it.
It was a heavy, cream-colored envelope. The return address was a federal holding facility. My blood ran instantly cold. I stared at the name printed neatly in the upper left corner: R. Vance.
I stood in the hallway for five minutes, debating whether to throw it directly into the fireplace. I didn't want his poison back in our house. But I knew Sarah. Withholding it would be a betrayal of the absolute transparency we had fought so hard to rebuild.
I walked into the living room. Sarah was sitting by the fire, a blanket draped over her lap, reading a book. I held out the envelope.
She looked at it, her eyes tracking the name. Her jaw tightened, a brief flash of old anger surfacing, but she didn't flinch. She took the letter, breaking the seal with her thumb, and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper.
I watched her face closely. Her eyes scanned the handwritten words. There was no shaking. No tears. Only a clinical, detached focus.
After a minute, she finished reading.
"What does it say?" I asked, my voice tight.
Sarah let out a short, dry laugh—a sound utterly devoid of humor. "He's begging," she said flatly. "He talks about his daughters. He talks about how the stress of the trial is giving him heart palpitations. He says he made mistakes, but he's a good man at his core, and he's asking me to write a letter of leniency to the judge before the trial begins."
The absolute audacity of the man made me sick to my stomach. "Are you going to respond?"
Sarah looked at the letter. There was no dramatic sigh, no agonizing moral debate. She simply leaned forward, holding the cream-colored paper over the open flames of the fireplace.
The heat caught the edge. The paper curled, turning brown, then black, before erupting into a bright yellow flame. She held it until the fire licked dangerously close to her fingers, then dropped the burning remnants into the ash.
May you like
We watched Richard Vance’s final, pathetic plea turn into grey dust.
"I already gave him my answer," Sarah said quietly, leaning back into the sofa. "The fire can have his apologies."
