Diana's Sentencing
Chapter 12 - Diana's Sentencing
Marcus Webb's trial concluded four months after his arrest, the overwhelming weight of financial evidence, Eleanor's detailed testimony, and his own cooperative confession resulting in a sentence of fourteen years for kidnapping, fraud, and elder abuse.
Diana's own legal proceedings, resolved through a separate plea agreement given her cooperation with investigators, resulted in a considerably lighter sentence of three years, prosecutors acknowledging her genuine, if severely belated, decision to come forward voluntarily before being formally confronted with the evidence against her.
Sophie attended both sentencings, sitting beside her grandmother, feeling a complicated, exhausting mixture of vindication and grief as she watched her own mother formally sentenced for her role in a crime that had nearly cost Eleanor her life.
"How do you feel," Eleanor asked, as they left the courthouse together following Diana's sentencing.
"I don't fully know yet," Sophie admitted. "I keep wanting to separate the mother I grew up with from the woman who knew where you were for nineteen days and said nothing. I don't think those two versions of her can actually be separated, though. I think they're the same person, and I think that's the hardest part."
"I've had considerably more time to sit with that realization than you have," Eleanor said gently. "I want you to know it doesn't get simpler with time. It just becomes something you learn to carry without it consuming every other feeling you're still allowed to have."
Sophie nodded, understanding the wisdom in that, though the specific grief of losing her relationship with her mother to something this preventable, this avoidable, still sat heavy in her chest regardless.
Diana wrote Sophie a letter from prison, three months into her sentence, a careful, honest account of her own guilt that Sophie read three times before deciding how to respond.
May you like
"I don't expect your forgiveness," Diana wrote. "I understand I may never earn it, and I've made a kind of peace with that possibility. I only want you to know I love you, I always have, and the worst thing about everything I've done is understanding exactly how much my own fear and greed cost the people I love most."
Sophie sat with the letter for a long while before folding it carefully and placing it in a drawer, not quite ready to respond, not quite ready to fully close the door on ever responding either.
