My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 13

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 13: The Sister at the Gate

Eight years, four months, and eleven days.

They gave me back my wedding ring in a plastic bag. I left it on the counter.

They gave me a blue suit that had been in storage since my trial, and it hung on me like a sail, and I wore it anyway. They gave me a check for four hundred and twelve dollars, gate money, which I put in my pocket and still have, uncashed, in a drawer.

Dee walked me to the yard.

She wasn’t allowed past the inner gate. We stood there with the guards pretending not to watch, and she

straightened my collar with her ruined hands, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

“You’ll teach me the phone,” she said finally.

“You’ll get out.”

“Don’t.”

“Dee. The warden who denied you three times is in a federal holding cell. The new parole board sits in six weeks.” I took her face in my hands. “Rockport. The oak. The black rock. You promised.”

She nodded. Her mouth was trembling.

“Go on,” she said. “Go be somebody.”

The gate opened.

I walked through it.

Outside, the world was very large and very loud and smelled like wet grass, and I stood in the parking lot

and breathed it and then I saw her.

Chloe.

Alone. No cashmere coat beside her. She was standing next to a car I didn’t recognize with her arms wrapped around herself, and her face was blotched from crying, and when she saw me she took two steps forward and stopped like she’d hit glass.

“El.”

I said nothing.

“They arrested him. This morning. They came to the house and-El, the baby was upstairs, and they put him on the floor in front of me, and he looked at me like it was my fault.” Her voice broke. “The lawyer says. they froze everything. All the accounts. Ashford Capital. The house. Everything’s gone.”

“Everything was mine, Chloe. It didn’t go anywhere. It came home.”

She stared at me.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “About the man. About Daniel. He told me you’d-he told me you’d found out about us and lost it, that you’d taken the gun, and I believed him, El, I believed him, and then in the visiting

room when you said fifty thousand dollars-”

“You knew you were lying on the stand.”

Silence.

“You knew you didn’t see me leave. You knew Grant asked you to say it. You sat there in Mom’s earrings

and swore an oath and sent me to hell for eight years because he asked you to.”

“I was twenty-six-”

“I was twenty when I started raising you.”

She sobbed. Really sobbed, the way she did as a kid, fists in her eyes.

“What do you want me to do? Tell me what to do. I’ll testify. ‘INtell them everything, the alibi, all of it. El, please. I have a baby. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

I looked at my sister for a long time.

I want you to know I thought about it. I want you to know I’m not made of stone. Eight years of fury is a heavy thing to carry and there’s a part of you that just wants to set it down, on anyone, even the person who handed it to you.

But then I thought of Britt Kowalski laughing at dinner.

“Mom’s house,” I said.

Chloe’s head came up.

“It’s in my name. It’s the only thing Grant never got his hands on You and the baby can live there until she’s eighteen. Rent-free, I’ll have Naomi draw it up.”

“El-”

“That’s not forgiveness. That’s for Mom.” I stepped past her, “You’ll testify. You’ll give them everything. And

then you’ll never contact me again.”

“Where are you going?”

I didn’t answer.

A black car pulled up. Naomi Pryce behind the wheel, sunglasses on, a passport in a manila envelope on the passenger seat. She’d never asked whose name was on it. She’d said she didn’t want to know.

I got in.

Through the window, my sister stood in the parking lot of the prison she’d put me in, holding herself, getting smaller.

“Airport?” Naomi asked.

“Airport.”

She pulled onto the road. Blackridge shrank in the mirror until it was just a gray shape on a hill, and then a

smudge, and then nothing.

“Margaret Vale,” Naomi said after a while, eyes on the road, “files to Lisbon tonight.”

“Does she.”

“She does.” A pause. “Elena Ashford is under no obligation to go anywhere. She’s a free woman. She could

stay in Boston. Give interviews. Sue the state.”

I watched the trees go by.

“Elena Ashford,” I said, “has a boat to fix.”