Chapter 17 - The View from Englewood
FCI Englewood sat on the high plains south of Denver, surrounded by double chain-link fences topped with razor wire. From the narrow, reinforced glass window at the end of the Cellblock B corridor, you could see the distant, snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains—including the white ridges of Pass Creek.
For the first twelve months of my sentence, my world shrank to a eight-by-ten concrete cell, a metal bunk, and the daily drone of institutional routine.
I worked the early morning shift in the facility library, wiping down wooden tables and re-shelving dog-eared paperbacks. It was a mind-numbing existence, but it gave me access to daily national newspapers.
Every morning at 7:00 a.m., I opened the Wall Street Journal to the corporate coverage section.
And every morning, Clara’s name was there.
STERLING GLOBAL ASSETS CLOSES $1.4B CLEAN ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE DEAL.
CHAIRWOMAN CLARA BLACK NAMED TO FEDERAL RESERVE REGIONAL ADVISORY BOARD.
STERLING GLOBAL STOCK HITS RECORD $245 AS RESTRUCTURING COMPLETES.
There were photographs of her, too. Clara at international summits in Geneva; Clara standing beside state governors in Sacramento; Clara cutting the ribbon on a low-income housing complex in South Chicago.
In every photograph, she looked radiant, sharp, and entirely whole. She never wore high-fashion excess or flashy jewelry. She wore tailored, elegant lines, and carried herself with an quiet, impenetrable dignity that commanded instant authority.
One evening, my cellmate, an old accountant named Miller serving time for bank fraud, sat on his bunk looking over my shoulder at a magazine profile featuring Clara on the cover.
"That's your ex, right?" Miller asked, tapping his knuckle against the glossy page. "The one who took the whole company out from under you?"
I stared at her face on the cover—the clear brown eyes that had once looked at me with unreserved adoration in a tiny Boulder apartment.
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"She didn't take it out from under me, Miller," I whispered, closing the magazine carefully and setting it on my locker. "I dropped it at her feet, and she picked it up."
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