My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 04

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 04: The Price of My Silence

Ten thousand dollars.

Every month.

For three years.

Grant had been paying the warden of my prison since the day I arrived.

I sat in Curtis Hollis’s office and did the math automatically, because that’s what my mind does when it’s about to break. Thirty-six months. Three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. My husband was spending

more to keep me buried than he’d spent on our wedding.

“What does he get for it?” My voice sounded far away.

The warden folded his hands. “Peace of mind. Your parole applications receive appropriate scrutiny. Your mail receives appropriate attention. And should you become… unwell in here, your husband is assured the paperwork will be handled with discretion.”

Unwell.

I thought of the shower stall. The two cracked ribs. The nurse who didn’t ask.

“You let Rox-”

“I don’t let anything, Mrs. Ashford. This is a prison. Things happen.” He smiled. It was a kind smile, which was the worst part. “But I’m a practical man. And Captain Bergen tells me you saved him seventeen thousand dollars with a conversation. That interests me more than your husband’s monthly gratitude”

He opened a drawer and took out a ledger. Handwritten. Old-fashioned. He pushed it toward me.

“The state pays Blackridge to house you. Several private companies pay Blackridge to employ you. Laundry contracts. Call centers. A furniture plant in Bangor. And those companies, being grateful for a labor force that cannot quit, unionize, or sue, express their gratitude to me personally.”

I opened the ledger. Kickbacks. Dozens of them. Sloppy, traceable, spread across six accounts under his own name like a man who’d never once believed he’d be caught.

“You want me to launder this.”

“I want you to make it clean. And in exchange, your husband’s money will buy him nothing. Your parole hearings will be fair. Your cell will be safe.” He leaned back. “Or I can tear up this check, keep taking his, and you can go back to wondering who’s waiting in the showers.”

I looked at the ledger for a long time.

Here’s what I should have felt: rage. Despair. The specific horror of learning the man you loved had put a price on your body and a warden had accepted it.

Here’s what I actually felt: the click. The one I used to get at my desk at two in the morning when a spreadsheet finally confessed.

Because Curtis Hollis had just handed me the two things I needed most in the world.

Access.

And a man who thought he was smarter than me.

“I’ll need a name,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t hide money under your own name, Warden. You need a person who doesn’t exist. Birth certificate, Social Security number, a passport if you’re ambitious. It’s not difficult. A death notice in a small-town paper, a records request, some patience! I turned a page. “She’ll own the accounts. You’ll own

her.”

“And who will this woman be?”

I thought of my mother’s maiden name. I thought of the street she grew up on.

“Margaret Vale,” I said.

He liked it. Of course he did. He thought he was hiring a tool.

He walked me to the door himself. On the way, he took a small black Bible from the shelf, worn soft at the corners, and pressed it into my hands.

“Read this, Mrs. Ashford. Salvation lies within.”

That night, back in my cell, I held it in the dark and ran my thumb along the spine. Thick. Heavy. Six hundred pages of thin paper, and a cover stiff enough to hide almost anything.

Margaret Vale would need somewhere to live.

I opened the Bible to Mark 13 and began, very carefully, to tear.