Free From the Chrysalis by Karen E. Black Page A

although all she had to do was walk a straight line. There was no turning back. She had stumbled headfirst into one of those in-between places in her mind and she had to stay. She’d stopped breathing, and her heart almost stopped pumping, but she was kept in motion by other women nudging up against her. If she stretched out her left hand, she’d touch a wall of slimey green concrete blocks. If she stretched out her right, she’d brush the first in a line of doorless stalls, each equipped with glass wire mesh dividers, stools and black telephone receivers.  
She stopped, adrenalin surging through her. It had to be him in the first carrel. She hadn’t seen him in years, but the rest of the men in the room looked too much like convicts to be him. They ranged from one unfashionable extreme to another. Either their gleaming pates were shaved bald or they wore their long hair slicked back from lean, hungry, wolfish faces.  
But he …he was sitting on a stool with his hands folded in front of him and his neck craned to watch the entry door, every shining wave of his chin-length hair combed in place. In the past, they had sheared off everybody’s hair, but it was the seventies now. Wearing a pressed khaki shirt, matching pants and an expression of eager expectation, he looked like he’d been waiting for her all his life. Well, maybe he had.  
You’re the only one, he’d written her. And when he stood to greet her, she felt like she’d been awarded a prize.  
May’s kids always had such good manners , she heard her mother say as she took her place onstage. Every eye in the visiting room drew their way—or rather, his way. Just the sight of him was enough to draw her onto the stool facing him. She forced a nervous smile and when she did, she remembered to breathe.  
D’Arcy Devereux smiled too, the left side of his mouth pulling higher than the right. When he sat back down, the other prisoners and visitors pulled their eyes away to give him more space.  
A small, careful smile blotted out the darkness in his eyes, but he had aged ten years in the last five. Little wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes like spokes in a wheel, although he wasn’t yet twenty-five. Almost as if he were shy, he kept smiling. Suddenly she was fourteen again. All she wanted him to do was, well, speak to her. She thought briefly of the pond and a veil dropped. It always did. What else could a pubescent girl have wanted in 1966? With her own cousin, yet?
She opened her mouth then closed it. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t hear what she said. The glass divider was in the way. But for the first time since she’d gotten off the plane at Toronto International, her arrival unheralded, she felt a powerful sense of homecoming. Here she was in this strange place, this prison, and she never wanted to leave. Forget her dual citizenship, forget school. She belonged here . She belonged with him. And she’d die to keep this feeling. No matter what happened, no matter what people said.
When Dace motioned her to pick up the telephone receiver and said into his, “You’re so beautiful. I can’t believe my eyes,” joy flooded her veins, but the words didn’t matter. All she cared about was his voice.  
She shook her head, blushing. “I am not beautiful,” she said, shifting under his intense stare. Of course he was staring at her, she thought, stiffening on the stool like a butterfly impaled on a pin. Where else was he supposed to look? She was backed by a green wall with a round-faced clock ticking the seconds off, and already she was praying their hour would never end. Her own view was more compelling. A scowling, fat-faced guard was scrutinizing her and Dace more closely than he was watching anybody else.
“You really don’t know?” he asked, a puzzled expression on his face.
She shook her head again, her throat almost swelling shut with unshed tears. There was a steady hum of chatter in the visiting room, then the bus blond in the