My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 08

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 08: A Month in the Dark

“Sit down, Elena.”

He’d never used my first name.

“Do

you understand what you’re asking me?” Hollis walked to the window. “You want me to call the district attorney. Reopen a closed case. Bring investigators into this facility. Investigators who will ask why a convicted murderer has unrestricted access to my office.”

“I’ll never say a word about your money. I’m as guilty as you are for laundering it. You know that.”

“I know you think that.” He turned. “And Britt Kowalski. A car thief with three convictions who heard a story from a woman who heard it from a man. You want to stake your life on that?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Truth.” He said it like a word in a foreign language. “Mrs. Ashford, do you know what your husband told me the day you arrived? He said you were brilliant, and stubborn, and you’d never stop. He said you’d find a way. He was quite worried about it.”

My blood went cold.

“He asked me to make sure you didn’t.”

“I have a witness-”

“You have a car thief.” He pressed a button on his desk. “And now you have thirty days in solitary for leaving your assigned area and threatening a warden. We’ll talk when you come out. About the accounts.

About what’s reasonable.”

Two guards came through the door. Not Bergen. Men I didn’t know.

“Warden-”

“Take her.”

I didn’t fight. There was no point. But as they pulled me into the hall, I looked back and saw him already sitting down, already reaching for the phone, and I knew he wasn’t calling the DA.

Solitary at Blackridge is a six-by-nine box with a slot for food and a light that never turns off.

I’ll spare you most of it….

I’ll tell you I did math. Two point three million dollars in Margaret Vale’s accounts. Fifty thousand dollars for Daniel’s life. Ten thousand a month for mine. I calculated, to the penny, what Grant Ashford had spent to destroy me, and I calculated what it would cost to destroy him back.

I’ll tell you I recited Mark 13:35 until it stopped being words.

I’ll tell you that around day twelve I started talking to Daniel, and that he didn’t answer, and that I kept

doing it anyway.

I’ll tell you that on day twenty-eight, a food slot opened and a piece of paper slid through with my tray. Bergen’s handwriting. Three words.

Don’t sign anything.

I didn’t know what it meant. I held onto it like a rope.

Day thirty. The door opened. Light that hurt. A guard walked me back to B-block without speaking, and every woman in the corridor looked at me and then away, fast, the way you look at an accident.

Dee was waiting in my cell.

She’d aged. Thirty days and she’d aged ten years. She was sitting on my bunk with her hands folded, and when she saw me she stood, and I saw her mouth working before any sound came out.

“Dee.”

“Sit down, baby.”

“Dee, where’s Britt? I need to talk to her before-”

“Elena. Sit down.”

I sat.

She took my hands. Hers were ice.

“Sixteen days ago. Night count. They found her in her cell.” Dee’s voice cracked down the middle. “They’re calling it suicide. Bedsheet. She was-she was laughing at dinner, Elena. She was laughing. She said she was gonna help you and then she was gonna go home and see her mama.”

The cell went very quiet.

“Who found her?”

“Guards. New ones. The ones who took you.”

I looked at the wall where my Bible sat on its shelf, exactly where I’d left it, untouched.

Curtis Hollis hadn’t searched my cell while I was gone.

He hadn’t needed to. He’d just needed a girl with a busted lip and a laugh to stop talking, and he’d made it happen, and he’d done it knowing I’d come out and understand exactly what he’d done.

It was a message.

I understood it perfectly.

“Dee,” I said, and my voice was not steady anymore, it was something else, something I’d never heard

come out of me. “I need your nephew to make one more trip to Augusta.”