The Secret Island
Chapter 83: Failure of Imagination

The soft hand that was holding Martin's hand was shaking...

"

Celine was much stronger than him.

He gave up. He just gave up and yielded to her. Everything was obvious.

He gave Celine a smile with tears in his eyes. She returned with a smile, but her eyes turned to confusion when he let go of her hand. "Martin..."

He didn't let her be confused for long, and Martin quickly hugged her.

"Thank you." He whispered to her ears. Celine's body was trembling.

The increasingly heavier rain made the weather start to get cold. But that wasn't the real reason the woman in his arms began to show weakness.

"Without you, I don't know what I will turn into. Thank you for always being beside me...."

While he was trying to express his appreciation, she hit him on the shoulders.

"Ouch! Why did you hit me!?"

"And I'm not afraid to do it again!" And she hit him again, stronger this time.

"Ouch!"

"You silly man! I'm so worried about you!" Then she broke down into tears and repeatedly hit him on the shoulders.

"Last night, when I walked into the room, I thought you were self-harming yourself. And I was worried sick for you! How dare you! How dare you make me this worried about you? You didn't tell me anything!"

"I'm sorry...that will not happen again. I promise. This time for real." He let her hit him. With her wear blow, that didn't hurt at all.

"Do you... have any secret you can't tell me about?" After Celine had cried and the storm had passed, she asked him the question with a concerned voice.

"...." He was reluctant to tell her the truth. But at last, Martin made that decision. He made the decision to tell her what had happened because Celine deserved the truth. "Hmm..."

Celine looked up and met his eyes.

"Martin... tell me." Her eyes were serious, and he couldn't hide the secret that he had been keeping from her anymore.

"Don't be so serious...." He tried to lighten the mood, but her eyes didn't change. She wanted the truth from him. And he knew that Celine was always very serious when it came to stories about his past. She cared for him and genuinely wanted him to have a good life.

He got up from the sofa where we had been sitting and extended his hand to her.

It was time...

It was time for him to revisit that memory one more time. "Let's talk about it."

****

He was an inmate in a low-level security prison because the crime he committed, well, the crime that he was forced to admit that he committed, was financial fraud. That damned lawyer of his old company ensured him that being a white-collar criminal would put him straight to a low-security prison, and with that came inmates with nonserious crimes. He didn't have to deal with murderers as fellow inmates. Martin expected a relatively easier time there. He thought he only had to serve the time, and he could be out with no fuss at all in a few years or even months.

He wasn't exactly wrong.

Until that day happened.

The sky was bright, and he could say it was a day with the best weather that enticed him to walk around the ground of the prison facility during the break. No other inmates knew why he was there nor what his charges were. The one major rule he held on to was not to trust anyone.

Most of the inmates there were charged with petty theft, failure to pay fines on time, breaking the law on petty things and getting charges that were not serious at all. Most prisoners didn't appear to be bad people from the short conversation he had with them. They were just from a bad neighbourhood and victims of an economic downfall that forced them to turn to commit crimes to survive. They were from the working class, the sort of people he never gets a chance to know... Martin was ashamed to admit to himself that he was from the top 1%; the only people he hung out with were working on Wall Street, and they earned absurdly high salaries. He knew things his colleagues or people in other firms were doing that had a huge impact on the overall economy, mostly causing losses to retail investors while pocketing large profits. Oh, not to mention the lobbying. He was not that naïve to forget that. Everything was just working for him. And he never really sees the impact of his own action.

He didn't think of any ethics. He was hired to do the job and worked with some numbers, and all the world was to him.

But again, things he and his firm did caused a significant impact on the overall economy, and so when everything was exposed, it was not strange at all that it was on the news. And it was not strange at all as well that his face was all over the

news.

When other inmates knew why he was in for it, empathy turned into rage.

It was only three-minute news that was aired on a sunny afternoon.

When the TV screen turned black, all eyes that turned to him were completely changed.

That was enough to turn his world upside down.

The hatred in their eyes petrified him.

It was a dark hatred that resulted from resentment against fate, and he seemed to be part of the reasons that fate brought them to do what they regretted.

One of his specialities was merger and acquisition... through a hostile takeover. He initiated many projects that involved buying small companies and driving their price up, he and his colleagues would do everything they could to heighten the stock price, and once the firm gained total control of the company, they would sell it. They didn't care what would happen to the company over the long term. They didn't care if hard-working people lost their jobs. With small talks within a board room, those companies were just small chess pieces on the chess board. He read from reports that thousands lost their jobs and communities could lose their chances of economic improvement, but he thought he did his best to mitigate all that by offering a respectable severance package-that was all he could do. Still, that wasn't a good replacement for a full-time job and the security of a family.

"Because of you bastards, you made my family almost homeless!" A man yelled into his face that day. His eyes were red from rage and deep sorrow. His presence must have caused him to remember some bad memories of the layoff. He didn't know who that guy was or what his story was. He didn't know how much sin he had committed to how many people until that exact moment.

Boff!!

Martin found himself on the ground and blood on his lips. He was punched in the face.

Shouts of cursing continued to grow louder. The crowd gathered closer and closer. The story of his identity was whispered and told around from one inmate to another. He could see those hateful eyes. They looked at him as if he was the demon that destroyed their life.

Everything that happened that day still couldn't be compared to what happened the day after.

Everything that happened was just the beginning.