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Officer López was on duty this morning.
Sergio didn’t even have to get out of bed to know: López stayed loyal to his morning ritual of shouting at everything that was moving—or, to be exact, that wasn’t moving. It was impossible to oversleep when the prison guard with the worst temper was in charge of counting the prisoners in their cells, making sure that nobody had escaped overnight.
“It’s only a matter of time until this man gets a heart attack,” Antonio joked, looking down at Sergio from the top of their bunk bed. Antonio was a good cellmate, even though his talkative nature drove Sergio insane sometimes. But even with his talent of always finding something to talk about, Antonio was decent company, compared to some of the other prisoners who beat and raped their cellmates.
Sergio had been well known by the others ever since he’d received his life-long prison sentence. Although many people probably imagined it this way, prison wasn’t an isolated cave with no connection to the outside world. There were newspapers, just like some TV screens for the ones who’d earned some privileges due to good behavior.
Sergio had once been one of them. But that was just one of the many topics he tried not to think about.
Obviously, people who’d been locked away from society and real life for years—lots of bottled-up anger towards the police inside of them—ate up the news about the heist of the Royal Mint of Spain. Seeing a criminal outsmarting the entire Spanish police to the point where they looked like nothing but a joke in the media was pure comedy to them. Sergio had been a hero in their eyes when he’d gotten imprisoned.
Antonio had always been his biggest fan. Learning that he’d robbed an art gallery, Sergio hadn’t been surprised about how attentively the tall man had been listening to his retelling of the heist. In the end, Sergio had executed Antonio’s dream—only bigger, more professional and in another place. He’d told Antonio all the details of the heist, together with lectures about how crucial every little preparation he’d made was.
There was only one thing he’d never mentioned. No matter how many times Sergio had told the story of his heist to the curious prisoners around him, he’d never mentioned that he’d fallen head over heels for the lead inspector of his case. What had happened between him and Raquel was much too personal to give it away like an exciting story for the others to talk about.
But Sergio’s sympathy hadn’t lasted long. As the last months had passed by, a growing hate against him had risen among the prisoners. Many of them had expected him to try to escape and take them with him. They’d been certain that a mastermind who’d managed to execute the biggest heist in history would be able to find a way out of a local prison with ease.
And maybe he would have. But the pill that had been so hard to swallow for everyone who’d seen Sergio as their savior contained an ugly truth: he had no intention to escape. In fact, he wasn’t even in the mood to fantasize about possible ways to gain back his freedom.
The reason for that was simple, although he couldn’t tell anybody about it: he knew that he deserved to spend the rest of his life in a small cell with nothing but a bunk bed, a toilet and a sink. He deserved to eat the terrible prison canteen food, just like he deserved not to have access to the TV room and the library anymore. He’d earned this ridiculously pitiful life the moment he’d decided to lie to the love of his life for the sake of a God-damned heist.
Sergio tried not to think about Raquel, but it was impossible. Every time Antonio didn’t torture him with small talk or one of his stories, Sergio’s minded drifted to the woman he still loved.
He knew that the fact that he would rot in prison for the rest of his life wasn’t enough for Raquel. She’d told him how much she would have liked to kill him and the more he thought about it, the more he wished she would have done it. Not because of how depressing life in prison was, but because it might have given Raquel’s heart some closure. She was a clever woman; maybe she’d have even found a way to make his murder look like suicide and get away with it.
“Sergio?” Antonio shook him out of his thoughts, snatching Sergio’s blanket. “Get up or López will eat you alive!”
A heavy feeling in his heart, Sergio stretched his arms, standing up from his bed and placing himself next to Antonio behind the grid of their cell door.
Officer López inspected every prisoner from top to toe with the usual critical look in his eyes, counting loudly. “Twenty-two, twenty-three,” he went on as he stood in front of Sergio's cell.
When Sergio had received the number twenty-three on the day he’d arrived here, he’d been tempted to laugh about the bittersweet irony: his first date with Raquel had taken place on the twenty-third of October.
“Twenty-three, there’s a letter for you,” López muttered under his breath, throwing an envelope in front of Sergio’s feet. He glanced at it, frowning in confusion.
“This must be a misunderstanding,” he intervened, looking back up at the prison guard who was already on his way to the cell next to them. “There’s nobody who could possibly write me a letter. Everyone who would is either dead or in prison themselves.”
López took a step back, looking Sergio in the eye with a deadly glare. “Listen, you little know-it-all: this letter has your name written on it, so you’ll either read it, flush it down the toilet or shove it up your ass. Either way, you won’t waste my time with your tragic stories about how lonely you are.”
That being said, López walked away without giving Sergio the chance to reply. Slowly, he picked up the envelope from the ground, trying to connect the handwriting to anyone he knew. But the longer he looked at the letters, the more he grew sure that he’d never seen it before.
“Maybe it’s fan mail,” Antonio joked, crawling on top of their bunk bed and letting his legs hang down. “Do you know that there are websites on the internet with fact sheets of prisoners and an address if you want to send them a letter? I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a bunch of women being attracted to you,” he laughed.
But Sergio couldn’t care less about a pathetic love letter by a woman he didn’t even know. There was only space for one woman in his heart. It was Raquel or nobody.
“Come on, open it!” Antonio encouraged him, excitement in his voice. “I can’t stand watching you stare at this letter any longer.” He jumped from his bed, trying to snatch the envelope from Sergio and pull the sheet of paper out. The prison mail always came already opened to prevent anything getting smuggled into here. The staff even read every single letter, no matter how personal.
But as soon as Sergio saw and skimmed the first lines of the letter, he grabbed Antonio’s arm, forcing him to kneel down and hand the letter back to him. He could barely believe what he’d seen, his heart immediately pumping faster.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, mate?” he complained, massaging his arm. “Do you have a secret lover or are you already planning an escape and received some ecrypted messages nobody is allowed to see?”
“Encrypted,” Sergio corrected him, rolling his eyes. “And no, believe it or not, but I still don’t plan to escape and that won’t change. Now let me read my letter in peace, please.”
“Hey, we listen to each other taking a shit every day here—don’t tell me a letter by some chick is where you draw the line!” Antonio protested, suddenly sounding enraged about Sergio’s request of privacy.
“My mail is none of your concern,” Sergio snapped at him, walking to the corner of their cell and settling on the ground, his back leaned against the hard wall behind him. He had a hard time resisting the urge to punch Antonio for calling Raquel some chick . But he couldn’t get in trouble for defending her the second time this week.
“Is it so hard to leave the last remaining privacy to me in a place where such things as privacy aren’t treated like a basic human’s right?”
Antonio held his hands up in surrender, his lips quirking into an amused smirk. “Damn, if you’re as protective of her as of her words, it must kill you that you’re apart from her.”
He had no idea, Sergio thought to himself, pulling the whole sheet out of the envelope and starting to read what Raquel had written down.
Sergio.
You probably expected to never hear from me again. And if I’m being honest, I didn’t expect to ever change that either. But my therapist told me that I should write you a letter to get all these thoughts out of my head.
After five failed attempts to write something coherent that doesn't make me seem like a battered woman drowning in self-pity, I'm starting a sixth attempt. When my therapist gave me this idiotic task, I snapped at her and explained that you don’t deserve a single one of my words anymore. But then, she told me to just pretend to write to you and not actually send the letter. But since I've already wasted a whole evening and five sheets of paper, I decided that you get to read whatever I'm going to dump here.
Sergio’s eyes started to fill with tears. After six months of not hearing anything from Raquel, all these words coming from her overwhelmed him. He was torn between skimming the entire letter within a few seconds—too eager for what she had to say to read every word slowly after the other—and taking his time to process her words, anxious of how much they might hurt.
I don't know how to start, so maybe I'll begin by stating a simple fact before we move on to my feelings: I quit my job. And before you smile in victory and congratulate yourself for corrupting a dutiful policewoman, I want to clarify that this decision wasn't your doing at all. I decided to quit before we even parted: on the day my colleagues excluded me from the case because they suspected me of working together with you.
Sergio gasped for air, shocked about what Raquel had revealed to him. Of course, he’d known that Raquel hadn’t been in charge of solving the case anymore when Prieto had answered his call instead, making it clear that he’d been the one responsible for it now. But up until today, Sergio had believed that she’d been the one who’d made the decision to put someone else in charge, taking herself for being too emotionally involved.
I thought they were joking when they first told me to return my badge and my gun. Me, the person who moved heaven and earth to catch you and your people, should have been part of your gang all the time? This might sound like a good plot for a thriller, but not at all like the person I am.
But my colleagues saw the surveillance camera tapes of us kissing in the Hanoi and put pieces together that painted an entirely wrong picture of the situation. Their theory fit their image of me perfectly: the jealous woman who made false accusations of abuse to get revenge on her ex-husband turned out to be a slut who is so desperate for sex that she also sleeps with criminals in addition to that.
Clenching his empty hand to a fist, Sergio felt anger rushing through his body. Once again, her colleagues had turned Raquel into the villain instead of believing her when she’d been telling the truth. Once again, a man she’d loved had made her suffer not only from the heartbreak he’d caused her, but also from her co-workers' misogynistic beliefs.
He had a hard time figuring out what was worse: that Raquel’s story had repeated itself or that he suddenly was in the same league as Alberto—the man he despised with everything inside of him.
I realized that this work environment isn’t where I want to spend the rest of my life. I knew that Prieto would have asked me if I missed fucking you—pardon, being fucked by you, since women can never have an active role in anything according to him—every single day. Ángel would have offered me a shoulder to cry on, not without the intention of getting in my pants again if only he was nice enough. And even the ones who would have pretended not to care would have gossiped about me during the breaks. I’m a fucking joke to everyone, Sergio.
He felt a tear running down his cheek. If only he could tell her that she wasn’t a joke to everyone—not to him; never to him. No matter how much his feelings for Raquel might fade during his time in prison, Sergio was certain of never stopping to admire the fierce woman he claimed to be the love of his life.
I haven’t found a new job ever since. I sent some applications to other police departments in Spain, but either I got no response at all or one rejection after the other. It didn’t surprise me. I’m not stupid; I know that my reputation is ruined. Prieto is the big hero for putting you in jail. He probably would have never found your hangar without me, but what does it matter? In the public’s eye, I’m just a scandal to gossip about.
Once I received another rejection, I started asking myself if maybe all of this was a sign. Maybe I should not just leave my old department behind, but the entire police force. This statement is as eye roll-inducing as someone claiming to never date anyone again after a divorce—I know. And still, I couldn’t get what you told me in the hangar out of my head and replayed our conversation an embarrassing amount of times in my head.
Sergio felt his hands turning moist. For some reason, he’d always believed that Raquel hadn’t wasted a second to think of him, apart from some fantasies of how to end his life. In her position, he’d have been way too hurt to even recall the ideologies he’d thrown in her face when she’d been chained to the ceiling of his hangar.
You told me that I learned to see the world in black and white: for me, there are the good, law-obedient guys, and the bad guys who take themselves for being above rules authorities have made a long time ago. Back then, I didn’t want to listen to you. The last thing I needed in this moment was the man who lied to me about everything to make me question my perception of the world. But as much as I hate to admit it, you did have a point.
Growing up with my father being a policeman (I think I’ve never told you about this before), I learned how important it was to obey the law. After all, the people who didn’t were the ones that made my father drown in frustration when he came home, late and exhausted.
Many conversations with my therapist in which I started rambling about my professional experiences lead me to a realization: the law is just a perception of how things should be; invented and either passed on or changed by people with power.
It’s quite ironic that those people themselves often invest a lot of effort to violate the law without getting punished for it. If I told you about all the corruption I’ve witnessed during my years of working in the police force, you’d be holding a book instead of a single letter in your hand right now. Of course, most of these things were just so small that no judge in the world would care about them. Nevertheless, they were examples of people who are supposed to protect the law violating it themselves.
My ex-husband still walks around with no punishment and shares custody for my daughter with me, although he abused me emotionally and physically. I was too trapped in my established morals to realize that this entire situation was the perfect example of how the system I was protecting with so much enthusiasm pointed its middle finger at me. Someone who doesn’t give a shit about the law or basic humanity is supposed to protect other people—the irony would be funny if it wasn’t actually such a tragedy.
Sergio had almost forgotten to breathe while reading these paragraphs. Adrenaline was rushing through his body, making it tingle. He wanted to jump up and down his cell, punch the wall and scream as loud as he could. She understood him—she finally understood his morals. He could barely believe it.
I understand why you decided to execute this heist, Sergio. I always did; even when you first told me about it while I had you wired to the lie detector. I also understand why your father robbed banks. He was just another person the system had let down, trying to save his beloved son’s life. I neither blame him, nor his little boy who wanted to follow his footsteps. The only person I blame is the adult, intelligent man who knew what he was doing when he exploited the vulnerability of someone who trusted him.
No matter how embarrassing it was to cry in front of Antonio, Sergio couldn’t hold back his tears anymore. He felt his body trembling, his cheeks covered in wetness. This paragraph was like a drug—he had to read it over and over again, feeling his stomach crumble at each word. If such things as breaking hearts were actually possible, Raquel had just broken his.
I’m not going to throw curse words or insults at you now. Believe me, I’ve done that before and I can proudly say that I’m over the phase containing random outbursts of anger.
I don’t feel the urge to throw every origami I see in the nearest trash can and I hate the color red a little less than I used to. I can drink red wine again without wanting to puke and I resisted burning the sheets we made love in. Last week, I even wore the shirt I’ve been wearing on our first date again.
I’m making progress and although nobody else will ever acknowledge it, I’m really fucking proud of myself for it.
Her words blurred in front of the tears streaming out of Sergio’s eyes. All those months they’d spent apart, he’d been certain that it was only him who’d constantly gotten reminded of Raquel and the little time they’d had together.
It was as though his brain had a neurological defect that made his thoughts jump to her all the time.
The pencil the prison guards used to tick the prisoners’ presence every day reminded him of how she’d tied her hair back with it. The phone that offered the well-behaved prisoners the chance to call their families reminded him of their negotiation talks, but also of the time she’d accidently taken his phone home with her. The soap in the bathrooms reminded him of how he’d injured himself to avoid ending up where he was right now.
They hadn’t had enough time to make many memories and yet, he associated the most trivial things with her.
I tried to hate you, Sergio. Oh, how I tried to hate you. You have no idea how badly I’ve tried to despise you and everything that reminded me of you. But I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for me to hate you. Trying to hate you exhausts me and I really don’t need anything to soak the strength I’m trying to regain out of my body.
Maybe that’s okay—maybe I don’t have to hate you to get over what we could have been. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for how casually you lied me in the face while I was revealing the darkest parts of my past to you. But you’re behind high walls for the rest of your life and my forgiveness wouldn't change a thing about that. So, it doesn’t matter.
I have no idea how to finish this letter. Maybe you didn’t even read it and just tore it apart the moment you realized whom it’s from. Maybe you’ll read it multiple times. Maybe I’m making a fool out of me because you’re already hitting on the female prison staff as a part of your escape strategy. Maybe you’re reading it out loud, turning it into the prison’s entertainment program. Maybe you had to shed a tear reading it.
I don’t know what you’re going to do, Sergio. I don’t know you well enough to predict your reaction. I wish I would have had more time to get to know you—to get to know Sergio instead of Salva and El Profesor. I’m sure I would have fallen even harder for him.
I’ll never forget our time together and how happy you made me. I’ll never forget that you were the only one who believed my history of abuse without asking for proof. I’ll never forget that you played the piano for me and brought me flowers while your heist was falling apart.
I’ll never forget you and I’ll never forget what you made me feel, Sergio.
Goodbye.
Raquel
PS: Since you can’t ask me anymore, I’m telling you that I’m wearing an oversized, brown shirt that looks like a dress and super ugly underwear—I’m not kidding, it’s the kind of underwear you start buying when you’re sure that you’ll never ever have sex again in your life. Do whatever you want with this information.
“Damn,” Antonio said, jolting Sergio from his thoughts. He’d been so focused on the letter that the entire world around him had disappeared. “Whoever she is, you really love her, don’t you?”
“I do,” Sergio whispered, more to himself than to his cellmate. “And I always will.”