FIRST CHAPTERS
The first chapters of my future book
...
By the time Rexton decided to commit the crime, he had already rehearsed it a hundred times to ensure he would be caught. Yes, being caught was the most important part of the plan, and he needed to make sure he wouldn’t fail, as in every other thing he had tried in life.
Rexton was a journalist by title and a writer by affliction. He had lost count of the words he had written for newspapers, magazines, and websites. None of them meant anything to anyone. Even to him. He had covered city council meetings where nothing happened, protests where nothing changed, funerals of people no one remembered.
And his books… God, his books.
Seven novels sat unpublished on his hard drive, each one worse than the last in his own merciless rereading. They were not bad enough to be infamous, sure. But also not good enough to be famous. And Rexton was tired of trying.
He lived in a small apartment in an old Brooklyn building, where the hallway lights flickered as if even electricity had grown tired of trying. His place smelled of a bad mixture of old newspapers and brewed coffee. Failure, for him, sounded like the hum of his old refrigerator, relentless, patient, always there when the room went quiet.
The eviction notice lay on his kitchen table like a quiet accusation. Red ink. Final warning. He didn’t need to read it again. He knew the words by heart. He knew the math, too. Rent overdue. His checking account needed no checking because it was always negative.
He poured the last of the coffee and didn’t bother heating it.
Rexton was not tall, but not short either. Not handsome, but not ugly. Not fat, and not slim. Not bald, not hairy, not young, not old. Rexton and his life were a sequence of not.
On the television, the news banner scrolled beneath the face of a man who had hijacked the nation’s attention for more than three years.
KESSLER VANE TRANSFERRED TO BLACKRIDGE FEDERAL PENITENTIARY.
Rexton turned the volume up.
“…the most wanted man in the country until his capture last month,” the anchor said, voice solemn, almost reverent. “Kessler Vane is accused of orchestrating a string of murders across five states. Authorities believe the real number may be much higher.”
Kessler’s face filled the screen. Calm. Unremarkable. The kind of face you’d forget if you passed it on the street, which somehow made it worse. His eyes were steady, almost kind.
Rexton felt something electric stir in his chest.
He had followed the case obsessively. Kessler never spoke to reporters. Never pleaded. Never denied. When he was finally arrested, he surrendered without a word. No manifesto. No confession. No explanation.
A story that refused to tell itself.
That night, Rexton couldn’t sleep. He lay on his mattress, springs pressing into his back, staring at the stains on the ceiling. His thoughts circled the same forbidden idea, again and again, like a tongue worrying a loose tooth.
Someone would write his story. Someone always did.
They would get the interviews. The book deal. The awards. They would be invited onto late-night shows. They would be something that Rexton had always dreamed of.
But what could he do? He couldn’t get access to Kessler Vane. No credentials, no leverage, no reputation worth opening doors. He was a nobody.
But what about inside?
The thought made Rexton sit up in bed so fast that he could hear his back pop with the sudden movement.
Inside was different.
Prison is where the most interesting stories are. Where men talk because there is nothing left to lose.
His heart was beating harder now, faster. The idea frightened him. Not because it was impossible, but because it seemed very feasible.
He thought of all the great writers who had chased danger, who had crossed moral lines in the name of truth. He told himself this was journalism at its purest. Immersion. Sacrifice.
He also told himself the simpler truth: he had nothing left.
The crime itself was almost disappointingly easy to plan. Not violent. Not irreversible. Something that would get him time, not headlines. He had always been a nobody. This was not the time to seek the spotlight.
He chose something clean: identity fraud. He had written about it in one of his articles before. It’s incredible what you can learn from reading the newspaper. Just enough money moved the wrong way. Just enough time behind bars to get in front of Kessler and ahead of the story. He chose a federal offense because Blackridge was federal. He knew he would end up there because it was the only federal facility within transfer distance.
For the first time in years, every part of him was aligned toward a single purpose.
He imagined the book already. The weight of it in his hands. The opening line. He imagined readers leaning in, trusting him to guide them through the dark.
“I went to prison to meet a monster”, he thought.
The fantasy warmed him in a way nothing else had for a long time.
When the blue lights finally came knocking on his door, Rexton was ready. He had been ready for days. He had showered. Shaved. Packed a small bag with the few things he was allowed to bring. He stood in the doorway while the agents read his rights, feeling that nothing could go wrong.
As they led him down the hallway, past the flickering light, Rexton glanced once at his apartment. The empty rooms. The unpaid life. He had finally succeeded in something. Rexton smiled, just a little.
Outside, the air was cold and bright. Somewhere far away, beyond layers of concrete and wire, Kessler Vane waited in a cell with nothing but time.
The book preface was written. Now it was time to start the first chapter.
The transfer to Blackridge Penitentiary was weirdly calm. No chatter between the convicts, no eyes darting, zero kinds of sounds. Just faces staring straight ahead, expressionless. Rexton realized almost immediately that he was invisible. No one cared, no one noticed. That was fine. That was exactly what he wanted.
When the bus passed through the gates, the walls rose around it like cliffs. He felt like a rat sliding into a small crack in a giant wall. Someone pushed him from the bus, and Rexton stumbled, catching himself just enough to step inside Blackridge for the first time with his left foot. Maybe a bad-luck sign, he thought. But for someone who never did anything right, maybe it was a good omen to start with the left. He smiled at his wordplay. He loves playing with words. For a brief moment, his mind went to a highlight reel of headlines with puns he wrote. The favorite one was from when the local zoo was having a fundraiser to renew the panda section. “Bear Necessity” was his masterpiece.
“What are you laughing at, old man?” screamed a guard with a voice built for breaking men. “Keep walking. I’m sure you will find no fun in there.”
The gates, massive and iron, slammed shut behind him, and the sound echoed a truth Rexton had ignored for the past hours: he was locked up with the worst kind of people for the next few months, all because of a story. Maybe he was crazier than everyone inside. He gave one last micro smile with this thought and walked through the door.
“Line up”, a guard barked, voice sharp enough to cut the air. “Shoes off. Belts. Clothes. Everything. If you’re too dumb to follow instructions, just mimic the geniuses around you.”
Rexton obeyed. Every movement felt like it had been rehearsed for years. He felt like a pro. And he felt proud of himself for that. He was finally just another number in the system. Easier than he’d thought it would be. Maybe he was far too used to humiliation and indifference.
The first days blurred together. Meals, colder than the trays they came in, were eaten in silence. The dormitories smelled of mildew and sweat. The bunks were narrow, the sheets thin. Sleep came in fragments, broken by shouts, banging doors, vivid dreams, and the distant, unending wail of alarms.
Rexton learned quickly. He memorized the routines: the morning count, the evening count, the guards’ rotations, the subtle hierarchies among the men. He observed everything: the way a man walked, how a laugh was measured, how fear was part of the air most of them breathed, how easy it was to spot who was in charge.
He avoided trouble. He said nothing unless spoken to. But he listened carefully to every word, his ears straining to catch them. He carried only his small journal, hidden inside his uniform. He wrote every night, recording details for his future book and information to help his present self. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that gossip was far more valued than violence inside Blackridge.
A week passed before he heard anything about Kessler Vane. One of the inmates, a wiry man with a nervous tick, muttered something as he passed him in the yard. “Vane… new block… here.” That was all. But it was enough. Rexton was sure he could hear his heart beating in his chest, a reminder of why he was there. For a man who’d never had much luck in life, the feeling was unfamiliar. His cold, anxious heart seemed to trade places with a warm, steady calm.
“Is that what people feel when things work for them?” he wondered. “I could get used to that.”
The next morning, Rexton positioned himself in the yard, looking at an imaginary watch on his wrist. Maybe 2 minutes had passed. Maybe 20. Everything was so accelerated inside him that he couldn’t tell.
Then he saw him. His heart stopped and then continued at the same uptempo beat, like an old Discman hitting a bumpy road. Kessler Vane was brought out separately. Not officially separate. Just… differently. Always a guard or two near him. A slight delay in unlocking his block. A path cleared without anyone announcing it.
When Kessler stepped into the yard, Rexton saw him in person for the first time.
Even if you combined the best authors, writers, poets, and linguists, they wouldn’t be able to describe what he felt.
Kessler was thinner than on television. Paler. Smaller, even. There was nothing imposing about him. No tattoos. No exaggerated stillness. He didn’t scan the yard like prey or predator. He simply walked to a bench near the far fence and sat, like he was coming from the bathroom to sit in front of his 65” TV.
He sat alone. And alone he stayed. No one approached him.
Rexton waited five minutes before moving. Casual. Controlled. Just another inmate stretching his legs.
He took three steps toward the bench. He was already thinking about the first exchange of words.
“Hey.” A hand clamped down on his shoulder.
Not a guard. A thick-necked inmate with tired eyes and a scar running from ear to chin. The man looked at Kessler, looked at him, and waited a very long second before speaking.
“You new?”
Rexton nodded. The inmate completed:
“Just don’t.”
That was all. The man released him and walked away.
Rexton stood there, pretending to adjust his sleeve, pretending he hadn’t been redirected. Trying to understand the next step, and understanding at the same time that he’d better not take it. When he looked back toward the bench, Kessler was staring at him.
Not curious. Not amused. Just aware.
Their eyes met for less than a second. Then Kessler looked away.
That was it. He couldn’t do anything else but think.
The second attempt happened in the library.
Rexton had discovered that Kessler requested books constantly. Philosophy. Theology. Classics. Books he had never heard of before. And that was a very rare thing, because Rexton read a lot. Mostly to try to understand what was wrong with the ones he was writing.
The library was neither small nor big. Never empty, never crowded. If you had to stage a library for a Hollywood movie, that would be it.
Rexton arrived early and positioned himself near the returns cart.
Kessler entered without announcement.
Again, alone. Except for another guard shadowing him.
Kessler returned a copy of Crime and Punishment.
“Overrated”, Rexton said lightly. “Too much guilt. Not enough clarity.”
It was reckless. Intentional.
Kessler’s hand paused on the spine of the book.
For one suspended second, Rexton thought it had worked.
Then the guard stepped between them.
“Library time’s over for you”, he told Rexton, even though Rexton had arrived before Kessler.
Rexton opened his mouth to protest.
The guard didn’t look at him.
“Now.”
When Rexton glanced back while being escorted out, Kessler was no longer looking at the book.
He was looking at him.
Again, not curious.
Measuring.
The third attempt was almost successful. It was during the next day’s meal.
The seating patterns inside Blackridge were invisible but rigid. Territories existed without lines. Chairs had memory.
Kessler always sat at the end of a table near the far wall. Always alone. A space on either side of him that no one filled, like he had a terminal virus and people were afraid to breathe the same air.
Rexton carried his tray and walked directly toward the empty seat next to him.
He could feel the shift before it happened.
Conversation lowered.
Metal scraped.
A fork stopped midair.
He sat down.
No one stopped him this time. Maybe they were also curious to see what would happen.
No one spoke. But the silence became dense, oppressive.
Kessler continued eating. Slowly. Methodically.
He did not look up.
Rexton’s throat tightened. He forced himself to lift his fork.
“Quiet place”, he said, keeping his tone neutral.
Kessler finished chewing.
Wiped his mouth.
Stood up.
Left.
No reaction. No acknowledgment. Not even dismissal.
Just absence.
Two minutes later, a voice approached Rexton’s table from behind. He couldn’t even tell if it was a guard or another inmate.
“You like causing problems, huh?”
As he tried to continue eating, now alone, he realized Kessler did not need to defend his space.
The prison did it for him. But why?
Days passed.
Rexton studied him from a distance.
Kessler spoke to no one.
Worked alone during assigned tasks.
Walked alone.
Ate alone.
Even the men who carried violence in their posture, the ones who tested newcomers, who established dominance through proximity, avoided him.
Not fear. Not respect. Something else. As if stepping too close meant stepping into weather you couldn’t predict. It wasn’t authority. It wasn’t reputation. It was presence.
Most men leaked something: anger, boredom, hunger, insecurity, guilt. Not Kessler. Kessler seemed completely contained within himself.
A force field, Rexton thought.
Not built from intimidation. Built from self-sufficiency.
And how do you approach a man who needs absolutely nothing?
In the next few days, Rexton tried everything.
He adjusted his schedule. Changed work assignments. Timed his yard appearances. Sat in strategic positions in the cafeteria. Arrived early at the library. Left late. It reminded him of his years in investigative journalism.
Nothing worked, like everything else in his life before.
There was always something.
A guard drifting too close. An inmate interrupting. A shift in routine. Just his old friend bad luck, which was surely missing his company.
Days became a week. Week became plural.
The search stopped feeling tactical and started feeling obsessive.
Kessler remained unreachable. Protected by some kind of mystic power. Even accidents avoided him.
Rexton began to suspect that getting close wasn’t about timing. It was about finding the one place where the system loosened its grip. Maybe it was about trusting fate. And faith.
“Faith!” he shouted, like his own version of eureka. His love of wordplay had finally helped him for once.
“Of course!”
All inmates, religious or not, at some point visit the chapel. It was the only place where guards stayed outside, giving the illusion of privacy and a glimpse of life outside prison.
On a Thursday afternoon, wandering a quieter corridor near the chapel, he noticed Kessler entering it.
No escort beside him. No guard hovering at shoulder distance. Only one stationed outside the wired glass door, leaning back against the wall, indifferent.
The chapel had no sermons. No scheduled services. Just reflection hours. Benches, filtered light through reinforced windows, and the faint smell of old wood.
He noticed a pattern. He found out that Kessler went there every Thursday.
Not at exactly the same time, but within a narrow window. After lunch.
He never sat in the front. Never knelt. Always chose the middle bench, near the wall.
Alone, as always. All the other chapel visitors made an effort to sit far from him.
Rexton watched from the doorway, almost as if he were reconsidering his faith.
He finally entered.
He sat three rows ahead.
Kessler did not react.
The next Thursday, Rexton sat one row behind him.
Still no reaction.
It was unbearable how neutral Kessler could remain. As if proximity meant nothing. As if Rexton’s orbit didn’t register.
Next Thursday, Rexton took the place beside him.
It felt almost as if a miracle were happening before whatever god still watched this place.
Two other inmates were at the far end of the chapel. No guard inside. Only the one visible through the wired glass window of the door.
Dust floated in the narrow beam of light from the high windows.
For several minutes, neither man moved.
Rexton could hear the building breathing: distant pipes, a door closing somewhere down a corridor, the faint echo of metal against metal.
Kessler sat with his hands loosely clasped.
Not praying. Not restless. Simply still.
Rexton studied the side of his face. The pale skin. The faint hollow beneath the cheekbone. The absence of visible tension. He let the silence stretch, not by choice. For the first time, he had a clear chance to start a conversation without interruptions, but his own mind was interrupting.
It was almost impressive how Kessler could completely decline engagement without a drop of sweat.
One of the inmates near the front stood and left. The door opened. Closed.
Now there were only the two of them.
Minutes passed.
Rexton felt like he was performing alone on a stage with no audience.
Kessler’s force field felt even stronger. Rexton leaned back slightly against the wooden bench, feeling defeated. The man who loved playing with words had just been played by them.
He tried a fake cough, as if he could jump-start the conversation like an old car.
Not a flinch. Not a turn.
The chapel lights flickered, as if the spirits were watching another of his failures.
“You’ve been trying very hard”, Kessler said without moving an inch of his face, almost like a ventriloquist saying the words his puppet couldn’t.
Rexton was shocked. Not a single molecule of his body knew how to react.
He felt a mixture of terror and happiness, as if the prettiest girl in the bar were flirting with him.
He hadn’t expected acknowledgment. He hadn’t prepared for it.
Kessler turned his head. And the whole planet’s magnetic force seemed to turn with him.
Their eyes met fully for the first time at close range.
Not measuring. Not dismissing. Engaged.
“Why?” Kessler asked.
And in the quiet of the chapel, with nowhere else for the sound to go, the force field dissolved into something far more dangerous. Something Rexton was not used to: attention.
That single syllable struck with a precision that made Rexton wince. It was not a question. It was a probe — a lens focused on the deepest part of him. Every answer felt insufficient, inadequate, and somehow wrong. To speak felt like stepping into a trap he couldn’t see. Like disturbing a pattern he didn’t yet understand.
Kessler kept looking at him, his eyes echoing the question.
While Rexton searched for the right answer, the chapel seemed to respond for him. Dust motes spun lazily in the light. A floorboard groaned somewhere behind them, deliberate as punctuation. A distant door clicked, and the sound felt orchestrated, as if the building itself were asking the same question.
Rexton thought about words. The hundreds of headlines, puns, sentences he had crafted over the years. They felt irrelevant. Words were fragile here. He couldn’t just throw one. It would shatter.
Seconds passed like hours. He couldn’t tell the time when he was around Kessler. Every heartbeat, every breath, echoed too loudly against the stones on the walls and the wood on the floor.
“Because…” Rexton finally said.
His face betrayed nothing. In that moment, he could have won a world championship of poker.
“Because I thought you could use a friend.”
It was clean. Logical. Kessler was alone. Always. It made sense.
“You are lying. Strike one. Try again.”
The words landed with sniper precision.
“How could he know?” Rexton searched his mental catalogue for another answer. Incredible how he had rehearsed this moment for months, and yet, he was unprepared.
“Strike two”, Kessler said, without blinking. “You are thinking about lying. Don’t. Last chance.”
Rexton felt himself in all three states of water at once: melting in sweat, frozen in place, options evaporating.
He had one move left.
“I’m here to write your story.”
Kessler gave an almost imperceptible nod. He finally accepted the answer.
“So, you’re a writer? A journalist? Did you commit a crime just to get to me?”
Kessler’s unwavering calm slipped.
“Are you trying to make me famous,” he asked calmly, “or do you want the fame for yourself?”
Rexton didn’t hesitate this time. He had learned. No more lies. “I need the fame.”
A corner of Kessler’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
“Then you chose the wrong man.” He said it without defensiveness.
Not because he had done nothing. Because he had done far more than anyone understood.
“You think you’ll be famous for writing about me?” Kessler reached forward and picked up a black book with a golden cross resting on the bench in front of him.
“Do you know this book?”
He held it up between them.
“Do you know who wrote it?”
Silence.
“Most people don’t,” Kessler continued. “But they’re very sure who it’s about.”
Kessler placed the book back exactly where it had been. Same angle. Same distance from the edge. Perfect alignment.
“I don’t need fame,” he said quietly.
His eyes locked on Rexton again.
“And you won’t find yours in me.”
Rexton was still gathering himself when Kessler continued the whipping.
“You don’t want to understand me.”
The words were calm. Almost indifferent.
“You want me to justify you.”
A slight tilt of the head.
“You walked into a prison on purpose. And you think if I am complex enough, dangerous enough, profound enough… then what you did is justified.”
Silence stretched between them.
“You don’t care who I am. Or what I did. Or if I did…”
His voice lowered.
“You care about what I can make you.”
Rexton listened, petrified.
“You don’t want my truth. You want a version of me that redeems your decision. That makes you matter.”
The chapel felt smaller.
“If I’m not worth the sacrifice…”
A pause.
“…then you’re just a man who ruined his life for nothing.”
Kessler held his gaze.
“So the real question isn’t who I am.”
Another beat.
“It’s whether I’m valuable enough to save you from your own choice.”
Rexton exhaled slowly.
A long pause.
Something changed in him.
He was tired of being beaten and decided to retaliate.
“No,” he said, with perfectly calculated anger.
“You’re wrong.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“I don’t need you to be what they say you are. I need you to be honest.”
The words didn’t sound aggressive. They sounded surgical.
“If you were just a monster, this would be easy.”
Another pause.
“But maybe you’re not.”
Rexton leaned forward slightly.
“And that’s what terrifies you.”
The air changed.
“You’re terrified that if someone understands you, they’ll reduce you. Make you human.”
The word landed heavier than any accusation.
“And if you’re human…”
A small pause.
“…then you’re not a myth.”
Rexton held him there.
“…you are just ordinary.”
Silence.
“And that,” Rexton concluded with the authority of someone who painfully understands the subject, “is something you can’t live with.”
“So no, I don’t need you to justify me.”
A faint, controlled inhale.
“But you might need me to keep you extraordinary.”
Kessler took three seconds, maybe absorbing what he had just heard, then let out a laugh that could make any man run.
But Rexton didn’t flinch.
Kessler took one last long look at Rexton’s red face, got up, and left the chapel.
Rexton released every inch of his body that had been tense since his first day in prison.
He let the moment settle inside him, making sure to file it in a very special folder in his brain, next to “Bare Necessities,” as one of his proudest accomplishments.
Now, he just needed to see if it worked.
Who would make the next move?
He took his time to soak it all in. Then he glanced under his arms and smiled at the wordplay: he was completely soaked.
He got up to leave and saw a guard standing at the door, watching him.
“Rexton Gallow?” the guard asked, like someone who already knew the answer.
Rexton froze for a brief second. “Does he know me? Was he there the whole time? Does he know why I’m really here?”
The guard continued.
“You’ve got a visitor.”
The worried expression melted into surprise.
“Who could it be?”
The corridor to the visitation room felt longer than usual. Moldy concrete. Fluorescent lights. The faint smell of bleach and old breath. With each step, his mind rehearsed possibilities.
Not his parents. They wouldn’t come. They never came to anything that smelled like imperfection.
Not a friend. He didn’t have any who survived adulthood.
Not a boss or work colleague. He’d gone freelancing a long time ago.
No exes that still thought about him. He was a very forgettable lover.
So… that left only one option.
The disease.
The visitation room was divided by reinforced glass. He saw the back of the man first. Perfect posture. Expensive coat. Hair still disciplined. Even here, even in a prison visitation room, he managed to look curated.
The man turned.
Ethan. His older brother.
Same eyes. Different temperature.
Ethan looked at him the way people look at a dent in their car. Not horror. Not grief. Inconvenience.
“You look terrible…”
No hello.
“...as always.”
Rexton sat slowly.
A thin smile appeared on Ethan’s face. He had perfected that smile in adolescence: a tight upward movement that signaled superiority without warmth.
“I came as soon as I started receiving calls.”
“Calls?” Rexton asked.
“Yes. From people asking if we’re related. From clients. From colleagues. From mother.”
Ah. There it was. “Not ‘How are you?’, not ‘What happened?’. He was just here to tell me I was causing trouble.”
That was Ethan, since he was young. No one could steal his attention. Ethan always spoke first. Always louder. Always choreographed. He didn’t want love. He wanted the spotlight. And if love was a side effect, fine.
“What did you do?” Ethan asked calmly.
Rexton leaned back.
“What did they tell you?”
“That you were arrested… You stole money? Really? You keep humiliating yourself.”
Ethan was a black cloud over people’s heads. A parasite that fed on their energy.
His wife, Clara, had once been radiant. Sharp eyes. Quick humor.
She told Rexton privately once: “I think he needs admiration more than oxygen.” Rexton liked her for that.
Two years later, at a Christmas dinner, Clara barely spoke. She laughed when Ethan laughed. She agreed before he finished sentences. She monitored his expression before answering questions. Like a mannequin that had learned to blink. A beautiful mind dissolved slowly by constant correction.
Ethan never shouted. He refined. He adjusted people. Like furniture.
“You embarrassed the family,” Ethan continued. “Do you understand that?”
Rexton watched him carefully. This was not anger. This was damage control.
“You came here to protect the family name?” Rexton asked.
“I came here to understand how to contain this.”
Contain.
Not heal. Not help. Contain.
“You’ve always been dramatic,” Ethan said. “But this…”
He leaned forward.
“What exactly did you do?” His voice sharpened.
The whole truth would detonate everything. So Rexton chose the partial truth.
“I… I stole someone’s identity and used it to access financial accounts. I falsified some records,” he said evenly. “Opened accounts under someone else’s name. Moved a few thousand dollars around. Those types of things…”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed, disbelief twisting his perfect posture.
“You did what?!”
“For a story,” Rexton added quickly, even though the word tasted like ash.
“Oh, for a story?” Ethan’s voice pitched higher, as if the conversation had already become a scandal he had to contain.
“Just… a story,” Rexton said.
Ethan leaned back, exhaling like Rexton had ruined the air around him.
“You’ve been a failure your whole life,” he said finally. “And this… this is the obvious outcome. You ruined yourself. Again. For what? To make me look bad?”
Ethan’s narcissistic behavior always showed up in the fine print.
“You’ve been jealous your entire life,” Ethan continued calmly.
Still the same disease. He contaminated interpretation. He rewrote history in real time to make himself the protagonist.
“I was never jealous,” Rexton thought, without speaking. Maybe because he wasn’t sure. Ethan always won everything, even their parents’ love. Rexton lost count of the times he’d heard, “Why can’t you be more like him?”
“You think this is about you?” Rexton finally said.
Ethan’s eyes sharpened. “Everything affects me.”
Ethan stood and adjusted his coat. Even now. Always presentation.
“I’ll speak to a lawyer,” he said. “We’ll see what can be salvaged.”
Salvaged. Not saved.
At the door, Ethan turned.
“You’re disappointing,” he said, voice flat. “Nothing new. Nothing surprising.”
Then he left, leaving Rexton with the echoes of a lifetime under someone else’s shadow.
Rexton remained seated. Drained. Life with his brother was always exhausting.
Rexton walked back through the concrete corridors.
The fluorescent lights flickered in a slow, deliberate rhythm, like some unseen metronome marking the time passing until Kessler’s next move.
He returned to his bunk. The small cot, the threadbare blanket, the metal frame that groaned if he shifted wrong, it all felt strangely comforting now.
He tried to reconstruct every movement in the chapel. Every word. Every inhale. Every pause. What had worked? What had failed? What would Kessler expect next?
He reached for his journal, the small notebook hidden in his uniform. Pages filled with observations, sketches, small details that seemed trivial but were gold for the story he would write. He flipped to the last page and read the few words he had scribbled after the chapel encounter:
He sees. He measures. He does not give. He waits. Wait. Wait. Wait. And then the word wait repeated a dozen more times.
And now, the story was waiting. Not in words, not in ink. It was waiting in the form of Kessler’s next move.
Rexton didn’t know when that move would come. He didn’t know if Kessler would speak, act, or even acknowledge him at all.
But he was ready. Ready to move when the moment came. Ready to respond. Ready to survive. Ready to write.
Surprisingly, Rexton didn’t have to wait long.
The next day, during yard time, he was halfway through a slow lap along the perimeter when something felt… off. The court, usually crowded with men shooting hoops or chasing balls, was unusually empty. Only a handful of inmates lingered near the edges.
His pulse quickened.
There, on the stands, sat Kessler. Right in the center. Just him, quietly watching a nonexistent basketball game.
Rexton didn’t fake anything. He didn’t hesitate. Step by deliberate step, he approached the stands and slid onto the bench beside him. Close enough to be noticed, far enough not to intrude.
Kessler didn’t turn. He didn’t acknowledge him. He just sat, perfectly still, as the world had paused around them.
For a long moment, neither moved. The distant clang of a gate echoed once, then faded into silence. The emptiness of the court made every sound exaggerated: the scrape of a shoe on concrete, the distant cough of a lone inmate, even the whisper of wind through the chain-link fence.
Rexton kept his hands on his knees, pretending to watch the invisible game.
Kessler tilted his head just slightly. The faintest acknowledgment. No warmth. No invitation. Just awareness.
It was enough for Rexton to take it as a green light. He reached for the journal in his uniform. It was upside down, and before he could even flip it right-side up, Kessler reacted.
“No.” Fast, dry, lethal.
Rexton put the journal back into his uniform.
It’s incredible how such a small word could carry devastating consequences. But that was not the case.
Kessler didn’t say no with anger or disapproval, but with redirection.
“No writing. Just listening.”
Rexton used every ounce of control he had in his body to hold the smile. He needed to show indifference. He succeeded on the first, but failed on the latter.
“Thank you,” he said, instantly regretting it.
“There’s a reason I’ve never told this to anyone,” Kessler began, his voice low, almost swallowing Rexton’s quiet “thank you.”
“No one would understand. No one would believe. And I chose to be called a monster rather than a madman.”
The look on Rexton’s face was like seeing a paraplegic walk.
“No one would grasp how special I am… what I’m doing… No one…”
This time, Rexton didn’t hold the smile. Once again, he was happy to be a no one.
Kessler finished, his eyes drifting into the distance, as if preparing to return to a place he hadn’t visited in a very long time:
“So listen carefully, because I will only tell you my story once, and we will never trade words again after that.”