Part 10: Tomás From Behind Glass
The meeting happened in March, at Valeria's request, against the mild discouragement of both Fernanda and Dr. Sandoval, who had professional reservations about the timing while both being careful to frame them as considerations rather than prohibitions, because they both understood, by now, that Valeria's decisions about her own life were exactly that — her own — and their role was to make sure she made them with full information rather than to make them for her.
She wanted to see him.
Not because she needed closure, which was a concept Dr. Sandoval had gently but persistently unpacked as more complicated and less reliably achievable than popular culture tended to suggest. Not because she had things to say to him that hadn't been said, because the victim impact statement Hannah had written into the record covered everything she needed said on paper and in public. Not even out of anger, because the anger had transformed during the months since the courtroom into something quieter and more durable, a kind of structural knowledge rather than a hot, consuming feeling.
She wanted to see him because she had spent three years calibrating her entire nervous system to his presence, his moods, his expressions, and she wanted to sit across from him in a room where the power had completely reversed and know, in her body rather than just in her mind, that the calibration had changed.
The visitation room was smaller than she expected. White walls, fluorescent lighting, the particular acoustic quality of institutional spaces, visitors and inmates separated by a partition, two chairs on each side, a guard at the door.
Tomás came in and she saw him adjust, the moment he sat down, to the reality of her sitting there — not afraid, not apologetic, not performing anything. Just present, watching him with the clear, unrattled attention she had brought to every professional analysis she'd ever undertaken.
He looked diminished in a way that had nothing to do with the institutional clothing or the absence of the tailored suits. He looked like a man whose scaffolding had been removed and who had turned out not to be structurally independent of it.
He didn't say anything immediately. She let the silence run.
"You look well," he finally said.
"I am well," she said. Not a performance. Just accurate.
He looked at his hands. Then at her. Something moved across his face that she spent a moment identifying, because she had not seen it from him before, not quite like this — something that was not exactly remorse but was related to it, a species of regret that seemed more about outcome than about act.
"I didn't think it would go this far," he said.
She studied him. "When you say it — do you mean what you did? Or do you mean the consequences of what you did?"
He blinked.
She nodded slowly, as if he had confirmed something she already suspected.
"That's what I thought," she said, and stood up.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. She had learned everything she came to learn in the space of four minutes, and the learning was complete: the man across from her was not a man who had looked at what he had done and understood it. He was a man who had looked at what he had lost and felt bad about losing it. The distinction was total, and it told her with complete clarity that she was leaving this room having put something down that she hadn't fully realized she was still carrying.
The guard opened the door for her.
May you like
She walked out into the hallway and felt the cool, institutional air and then the warmer air of the entrance area and then the March sun outside on the steps, bright and specific on her face, and she stood there for one moment with her face tilted up slightly and her eyes closed.
Then she went home and called her mother.
