An inmate at Terre Haute is allowed seven visits per month. He gets three hundred minutes of phone time. So out of a possible four hundred and twenty visits, Gina had used exactly zero. Out of a possible eighteen thousand minutes of phone time, zero.
Mason had tried calling her. He had written to her. It wouldn’t have been that hard for her to drive down there. Bring Adriana, sit in the visiting room for a few minutes. Just let him see their faces, say a few words to them.
Even a quick phone call. Five fucking minutes.
It would have given him so much. But it never happened.
“Not once, Gina. No visits, no calls, no letters. Just nothing. Like I was dead and gone.”
“I did what I thought I had to do, Nick. For Adriana.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s at practice,” Gina said. “With Brad.”
Mason worked over the name in his head for a moment. Brad. Bradley. He wasn’t sure which was worse. “Are you two . . .”
“We got married, yes.”
Mason felt those words washing over him. He knew Gina had divorced him. That was the one small bit of contact he’d gotten from her—or, rather, from her lawyer—seeing those papers come through and having to sit there in his prison cell and sign them.
But now, he said to himself, she’s living in this house. And, of course, she’s remarried. She stood in front of a judge and said all the words and she lives here with her new husband and is going to bed with him every fucking night.
Somehow it wasn’t really true until this second. When she said those words.
Cole must have known this, he said to himself. He made this deal with me, knowing I would try to get this part of my life back. Something that could never happen.
“Okay,” Mason said, measuring his words, “so my daughter is at practice with your new husband, Brad. What kind of practice?”
“Nick . . .”
“When will she be back?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I want to see her.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “Think about what you’re asking me here. Please, Nick, think about it. Your daughter’s in a good place. She goes to a great school. She has a great life. The life we both wanted for her, remember? She’s got that now. And you’re going to come around here, straight out of prison, and mess that up?”
“You don’t get to pick your parents, Gina. She got me. And I’m not leaving until I see her.”
“So how exactly do you think this is going to work? Are you going to come visit her every weekend? Have cookouts with us in the backyard? Are you going to come with us to the parent-teacher conferences? Or career day at the school, maybe? ‘Hi, this is my dad. He’s going to tell you how to steal a car.’ Is that how you think this is going to work, Nick?”
Mason listened to her. He was holding on to himself, keeping his cool. He knew making a big scene here wouldn’t help anything. But, God damn, even now she could still push his buttons. “You never brought her to see me,” Nick said. “My own daughter. Not one time in five years.”
“Because you broke your promise,” she said. Her voice was low, barely above a whisper. “Because you’re a criminal and you always will be. No matter what your piece of paper says.”
She stopped to wipe her eyes.
“I bet on you,” she said. “I bet everything I had on you. Look what I got. The best thing you can do for me, and for your daughter, is to just stay away.”
It hurt him to hear it. He could see it hurt her just as much to say it. He was trying to think of something to say right back, something to convince her that she had it all wrong. That he really was innocent and never should have been in prison in the first place. But the truth was, another man had made his conviction disappear, and, without him, Mason would still be in a prison cell.
There was nothing Mason could say to her. Not one word.
Gina was crying. She couldn’t even look at him anymore.
She reached out to touch his chest. One touch. For one second. All of the years they had spent together, the fighting, the making up, the sitting on a porch at night. All of the years trying to make a life. After everything, this was all she had for him now.
She pulled away from him, went back in the house, and shut the door.
7
Darius Cole was born on the streets of Englewood. In the suburbs, you inherit wealth. In Englewood, depending on which block you live on, and which side of the street, you inherit a gang’s colors. By the time he was thirteen, he was on a corner. This was back in the 1970s, when the city saw a thousand homicides every year.