My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 03

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 03: Do You Trust Your Wife
Spring of my third year, they needed ten women to paint the east wall.

Outdoor detail. Sunlight. Real air that didn’t smell like bleach and bodies. Every woman at Blackridge wanted it, and Dee got all ten spots for her people with two cartons of cigarettes and a smile.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re the only one who doesn’t try to pay me back,” she said. “It’s unsettling. Grab a brush.”

The captain of the guard was a man named Bergen. Big, red-faced, quick with his hands. He stood in the shade complaining to another guard while we baked.

“Thirty-five grand,” he said. “My brother drops dead, leaves me thirty-five grand, and Uncle Sam wants half. Half! For what? For dying?”

I stopped painting.

I know what you’re thinking. Keep your head down, Elena. You’ve had two years of learning what happens when Rox’s Sisters catch you alone. You’ve learned to eat fast, sleep light, and never, ever draw attention.

But I heard a number. And I heard a problem. And for two years I’d been a woman with a gun in her car and a sister in her bed, and I was so tired of being that woman I could have screamed.

I put down the brush and walked over.

“Captain Bergen. Do you trust your wife?”

His face went from red to purple. He grabbed my collar and dragged me to the edge of the scaffold, four stories up, and I felt my heels leave the boards.

“Say that again, inmate.”

The women stopped painting. Dee said, “Oh, Jesus,” very quietly.

“Because if you trust her,” I said, and my voice did not shake, I will be proud of that until I die, “there is no reason you can’t keep every penny.”

He stopped.

“What?”

“A one-time spousal gift. Tax-free. Up to sixty thousand. You sign the inheritance to her, she gifts it back. The IRS gets nothing. I can draw up the paperwork tonight. I was a forensic accountant. I used to charge four hundred an hour for this.”

He held me over the drop for a long, long moment.

“What do you want?”

“Three cans of cold soda for every woman on this crew. Real cold. Not the vending machine.”

He laughed. Actually laughed. Then he set me down.

An hour later, ten convicted women sat on a scaffold in the sun drinking ice-cold Coca-Cola paid for by the meanest guard at Blackridge, and for eleven minutes nobody was a prisoner. Dee had her eyes closed and her face turned to the sky. The nineteen-year-old who’d cried the first night was giggling.

“You not drinking?” Dee asked me.

“I’ve given it up.”

I hadn’t. I just wanted to watch them.

Because that was the day I understood something. In here, I wasn’t Grant’s wife or Chloe’s sister or the woman in cell 217. In here, I was a woman who knew where money hid. And every man in this place had money he wanted hidden.

Rox never touched me again. Bergen made sure of that.

Six days later, a guard came to my cell at midnight.

“Warden wants you.”

Warden Curtis Hollis had never spoken to me. He was a tall, silver-haired man who quoted Scripture at Sunday count and had run Blackridge for nineteen years without a single scandal. His office smelled like leather and lemon polish.

“Sit, Mrs. Ashford.”

I sat.

He slid a piece of paper across the desk.

It was a cashier’s check. Ten thousand dollars. Made out to a company called Ridgeline Consulting. Signed by Grant Ashford.

“I’m told,” the warden said, “that you’re very good with money.”