Chapter 14 - Confessions in Gray Concrete
While Khloe was ushering a new life into the world in the warm, sterile comfort of St. Jude’s, three hundred miles away in a state correctional facility, Isabella Rossi sat in her dim concrete cell.
The heavy iron door was locked for the night. The only light came from a single high-window slit casting a cold silver beam across her iron cot.
For weeks, Isabella had tried to hold onto her bitterness, blaming Marcus, blaming Khloe, blaming Vanguard, blaming the corrupt legal system that had stripped her of her designer lifestyle. But tonight, in the suffocating silence of the prison block, the illusions were completely gone.
She pulled a small sheet of plain notebook paper from her table and began writing with a blue stub pencil.
*'To Khloe Thorne,'* she wrote, her handwriting shaking.
*'I know this letter will likely be thrown into the fire before you ever read a single word. I know I have no right to write to you, nor do I expect forgiveness. Forgiveness is for people who made mistakes. What I did to you on November 14th was not a mistake. It was pure, unadulterated evil.'*
Isabella paused, wiping a bitter tear from her eye with the sleeve of her coarse denim jumpsuit.
*'I spent my entire life believing that beauty, money, and power were the only things that made a person worthy of existence. When I looked at you—a woman who was quiet, kind, and content without needing to crush others—I hated you. I hated you because you possessed a genuine dignity that all the money in the world could never buy for me. I wanted to steal your life, your status, and your husband just to prove that I was stronger.'*
*'When I raised my foot and kicked you that night... I saw the horror in your eyes, but more than that, I saw a mother willing to die to protect her child. In that split second, while I stood in my expensive red dress, I realized that I was the poorest creature in that room.'*
*'I am writing this because I heard on the institutional radio that you are in labor tonight. I pray to whatever God exists that your child is born healthy and strong. I hope he grows up to be as courageous as his mother. I will spend the next eight years in this concrete box, and for the first time in my life, I know that I belong here.'*
*'Sincerely, Isabella Rossi.'*
May you like
Isabella folded the piece of paper neatly, placed it inside a plain white envelope, and set it on the small shelf near her cell door for the morning mail guard.
She sat back down on her narrow cot, pulling the thin wool blanket over her shoulders. For the first time since her arrest, the raging storm of anger and ambition inside her chest fell completely quiet. She had lost her freedom, her beauty, and her high-society dreams, but in the cold gray concrete of her cell, she had finally found the truth.
