My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 05

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 05: The Night Daniel Died.

Let me tell you what really happened. You’ve earned it.

Daniel Reyes called me at 6:15 the evening he died. I remember because I was making dinner Grant

wouldn’t come home for, and I dried my hands to answer.

“E!. Can you talk?”

“Grant’s not here.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling.” He sounded tired. Daniel always sounded tired. “There’s something wrong with the Whitmore fund. I think Grant’s been moving client money through it. I think it’s been going on for a

year.”

I sat down.

“Daniel, that’s-”

“I know what it is. I’m going to the SEC on Monday. I wanted you to hear it from me first because you’re going to get pulled into this whether you knew or not, and El, I don’t think you knew.”

“I didn’t.”

“I believe you.” A pause. “Be careful. He’s not who you married.”

I was shaking when I hung up. I poured a glass of wine. I poured another. At ten I took a sleeping pill because I couldn’t stand the silence and I couldn’t stand the thought of Grant walking in and seeing my

face.

At 11:40, according to my sister, I left the house.

At 12:20, Daniel opened his front door to someone he knew.

The next morning, Grant woke me gently. He brought coffee. He said, “El, something terrible’s happened,” and held me while I cried for Daniel, and I remember thinking how lucky I was to have a husband like that.

The police came at noon.

My gun. My glove box. My sister, weeping on the stand, saying, “She’d been so angry lately. So paranoid

about Grant.”

I found out later that the Whitmore fund was quietly dissolved two weeks after my conviction. Every dollar

Accounted for. Every client paid in full.

With my forty percent.

I told Dee all of this in the library one afternoon, sorting donated paperbacks. She listened the way she did everything, without a flicker.

“Your own sister,” she said finally.

“I raised her. Mom worked doubles. I braided her hair for school.” I shelved a Danielle Steel. “I introduced

her to Grant.”

“And the warden?”

“Is a man who’s going to leave me alone in his office with his money.”

Dee looked at me sideways. “You’re planning something.”

“I’m doing his books.”

“Honey, I’ve been in here thirty-four years. I know what a woman looks like when she’s digging.”

I didn’t answer.

That night, Rox came for me one last time.

She’d heard, somehow, that I was the warden’s new pet. That I’d been seen in his office. She caught me, on the stairs with the Sisters and shoved me against the wall, and I felt her forearm across my throat and thought, calmly, so this is how the plan ends.

Then a baton cracked across her shoulder.

Bergen. Two guards behind him. They peeled the Sisters off me and put Rox on the floor, and Bergen leaned down until his face was an inch from hers.

“This one’s the warden’s property,” he said. “Touch her again, and you go to the hole for a year.

Understood?”

Rox understood.

They let her up. They walked away. Nobody asked if I was all right.

I stood there on the stairs, breathing, with Bergen’s word in my ears.

Property.

Grant had owned me. Now Hollis did. Different man, same deed.

I walked back to my cell and took out the Bible. Inside the hollow i’d carved through Mark and Luke, on paper thinner than a whisper, were the first six digits of a Social Security number that had belonged to a baby girl named Margaret Vale, who had died in Portland, Maine, in 1979, and who I intended to make very,

very rich.

They thought they’d bought a woman.

They’d bought a ghost.