My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 09

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 09: The Visitor

Grant came to see me in year eight.

Eight years. Not one visit, not one letter that wasn’t from a lawyer. And then a guard said, “Ashford, visitor,” and I walked into the family room and my husband was sitting at a bolted table in a cashmere coat like he’d stopped by on his way to lunch.

Chloe was next to him.

She’d cut her hair. She was thinner. She had my earrings in, still, and a diamond on her finger the size of a

molar, and when she saw me she made a small sound and looked at the table.

“El.” Grant stood. Actually stood, like a gentleman. “You look well.”

“I look like a woman who’s been in prison for eight years, Grant. What do you want?”

He sat. He slid a folder across the table.

“Your mother’s house in Rockport. The trust puts it in your name until you’re fifty. I’d like to buy it out. Fair

price. The money goes into an account for your release.”

I didn’t touch the folder.

“You want the house.”

“Chloe wants the house. She grew up there too.”

I looked at my sister. “You want Mom’s house.”

Chloe’s lips parted. Nothing came out.

“She’s pregnant,” Grant said, and put his hand on her stomach the way he used to put his hand on mine. “We’d like to raise the baby there. It’s what your mother would have wanted. Family.”

I laughed.

I hadn’t meant to. It just came out, sharp and ugly, and Chloe flinched like I’d hit her.

“Family,” I said. “You paid a man fifty thousand dollars to shoot Daniel Reyes and frame me for it, and you’ve paid the warden of this prison ten thousand a month for eight years to make sure I stay here, and

you sat next to my sister in a courtroom while she lied under oath, and you want to talk to me about family.”

Grant’s face didn’t move. But Chloe’s did.

Her eyes went wide. Then they went to Grant. Then back to me. And I watched, in real time, my baby sister realize that she hadn’t known about the fifty thousand.

“Grant,” she whispered.

“She’s confused, sweetheart. Eight years does that.”

“Grant, what does she mean, paid a man-”

“Chloe.” His hand closed on her wrist. Not hard. Just enough. “We’ll talk in the car.”

I looked at his hand on her wrist and I saw, just under the sleeve of her sweater, the edge of a bruise gone yellow.

Oh, Chloe.

Oh, you stupid, stupid girl.

“Sign the papers, El.” Grant’s voice was warm again. “Hollis tells me you’ve been very cooperative lately.

Let’s keep it that way.”

Hollis tells me.

Of course he did. Of course they talked. Two men who owned me, comparing notes.

I pulled the folder toward me. I opened it. I read every page, because I don’t sign what I don’t understand, and then I closed it and pushed it back.

“No.”

“Elena-”

“No, Grant. Mom left it to me. It’s the only thing I have with my real name on it.” I stood up. “Take your wife and go home.”

Chloe looked up at me then, finally, with her face full of something I didn’t have a word for.

“El,” she said. “I didn’t-”

“You did,” I said. “You just didn’t know how much.”

I walked out.

That night I lay on my burk and told Dee about Portugal.

I’d never told anyone. A white house on a cliff outside Lagos, with blue shutters and a boat in the harbor that needed work. I’d seen it on a postcard when I was nineteen. I’d told Grant about it on our honeymoon and he’d laughed and said, “Why would anyone want to sit still?”

“There’s a field behind my mother’s house in Rockport,” I said through the vent. “Big oak at the north end. Stone wall. If you’re ever out, Dee, and I’m not-there’s a black rock in that wall that doesn’t match. Look

under it.”

Silence.

“Elena.” Dee’s voice was careful. “Baby, you’re scaring me.”

“Just promise.”

“Promise me you’re not planning to end up in that girl’s cell with a bedsheet.”

I stared at the ceiling.

“Dee,” I said. “I’m planning something much worse than that.”