Chapter 5 - The Confrontation in Glass
On Thursday morning, against his attorney’s advice, Connor requested a private visitor’s meeting with his mother at the Davidson County Detention Center. He needed to look her in the eyes one last time before the federal indictments dropped.
The visiting room was cold, sterile, and smelled faintly of floor wax and stale coffee.
Connor sat on a small metal stool behind a thick panel of bulletproof glass. A moment later, the heavy steel door opened, and a guard escorted Teresa Bradley into the room.
She looked terrible. Her new designer dress had been replaced by an oversized orange jumpsuit. Her hair was unstyled, her face pale and wrinkled, and her hands were bound in wrist shackles. But despite her pathetic appearance, her eyes still flared with unrepentant arrogance when she saw her son.
She picked up the plastic telephone handset on her side of the glass. Connor picked up his.
"Connor!" Teresa demanded instantly, her voice shrill through the speaker. "Have you lost your mind?! Look at what you're doing to your own mother! I've been sleeping on a thin mattress for four days! My back is ruined!"
Connor looked at her silently, his expression entirely unreadable. "Are you finished?"
"No, I am not finished!" Teresa yelled, banging her hand against the metal counter. "You get that high-priced lawyer of yours to drop these ridiculous charges immediately! You tell the police that Mason was just holding those papers for safekeeping! We are your family, Connor! You owe me your life!"
"I don't owe you anything, Teresa," Connor said quietly.
Teresa flinched at his use of her first name. "How dare you call me by my name! I am your mother!"
"A mother doesn't forge her son's signature on a two-million-dollar life insurance policy," Connor replied, his voice dropping into a chilling register. "A mother doesn't take out a fraudulent one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar mortgage on her son's home. And a mother certainly doesn't force his wife to scrub floors on her knees while holding a sick baby with a hundred-and-two fever."
Teresa’s eyes darted nervously for a split second, realizing Connor knew about the insurance policy, but she quickly put her mask of defiance back on.
"That girl was nothing before you met her!" Teresa hissed into the phone. "She was weak! She was beneath our family status! I was trying to teach her how to be a proper wife! I was taking care of your money because you were too blind to see that she was going to drag you down!"
"Amy built me up when I had nothing," Connor said, leaning close to the glass. "You tried to destroy my family from the inside out out of pure, pathetic greed. You wanted my money, my house, and my life, while treating my wife like a dog."
"I am your mother!" she shrieked, tears of rage springing to her eyes. "You can't do this to me!"
"The federal prosecutors issued formal indictments twenty minutes ago," Connor stated calmly. "You and Mason are facing federal bank fraud and conspiracy charges. You're never setting foot in my house again. You're never seeing my son again. When Frederick grows up, he won't even know your name."
Teresa’s face drained of every drop of color. The reality of her total, absolute ruin finally smashed through her delusion. She began to bang wildly on the glass.
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"Connor! No! Please! You can't leave me here! Connor!"
Connor stood up calmly, set the telephone handset back on its cradle, and turned his back on her. He walked out of the visiting room without looking back once, while his mother’s frantic screams echoed uselessly behind the glass.
