Well this was… Michael thought, unexpected to say the least. He was back in his apartment, three days had passed since he had fired into the ceiling at the Bank, and in those days he had witnessed at close quarters the American legal system in all its tarnished glory. He'd planned of course for the arrest, the holding cell, the first shocked meeting with Veronica.

He hadn’t factored this outcome however into his complex plan, the plan that had apparently permanently marked his wall with pin pricks. He stroked his finger across the blemished surface as he walked across to the river view, his river view, the one he hadn’t thought he would see again. He had assumed that threatening a lot of people at the Bank with a gun and attempting to walk out with half a million dollars would mean that bail was not an option. He’d been wrong.

He wasn’t sure if it was a combination of first time lucky for Veronica, it was her first criminal case after all. Possibly it was a Judge who had obviously got up on the right side of the bed that morning and had read too many articles about the unmanageable overcrowding in America’s prisons.

Whatever the reason he was now back in an apartment he had partly packed up, with two weeks to kill before his second hearing. He could have refused bail, he hadn’t actually had enough to cover the $40,000 price it had been set at but Veronica had come through for him and offered it wordlessly. Refusing would have seemed, peculiar and he was already wary of letting Veronica get too close to him or his plan.

He wandered through the rooms, not clear if he was happy with this brief respite of normalcy. He’d psyched himself up for the county jail and the unflattering orange jumpsuits he had seen Lincoln in so many times.

Lincoln… he remembered his brother knew nothing as yet. He’d warned him on his last visit that he probably wouldn’t be able to visit for a few weeks, some lame excuse about a project out of town that made it impossible to make the strict visiting times at Fox River. Now he could visit again, should he?

As he reached his desk he spotted the file from work, his current project notes, the ones he had spent his last night before the robbery working on, preparing detailed handover notes for his assistant on the complicated refit at the large mall. He’d booked a weeks holiday, assuming that by the end of it he would be in jail. His story would have made the news and alerted his office to the fact that junior associate Michael Scofield would not be reporting for work on Monday. Now he could, but should he? He sat down and extracted the handover notes, placing them safely in the drawer of his desk so they could be found easily when he needed them. He turned to the pages outlining the problems with drainage for the store extension and taking out his pen started to make some rough calculations on a pad. Life goes on… kind of.