My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 02

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 02: Who Cries First
They bet on me before I was through the gate.

Blackridge Women’s Correctional sits on a hill in Maine like something that grew there. Gray stone, gray sky, gray faces pressed to the yard fence as the bus pulled in. Eleven of us stepped off in chains, and the noise started immediately. Whistles. Kissing sounds. A woman with a shaved head screaming, “Fresh fish! Fresh fish!” until it became a chant.

“Two packs on the blonde,” someone shouted. “She’s gone by lights-out.”

The blonde was me.

I learned later that the woman who took that bet was Dolores Baptiste. Dee. Sixty-one years old, thirty-two years inside, the only person at Blackridge who could get you anything short of the keys. She bet against me. She told me so herself, months later, laughing so hard she had to sit down.

“You looked like a paper cup, honey. I figured one good breeze.”

The first night, the lights went out at nine, and the crying started at 9:04.

It wasn’t me. It was a girl two cells down, nineteen, shoplifting turned assault. She wailed like something dying, and the whole block started screaming at her to shut up, and the guards came and banged their batons on her bars until she did.

I lay on a mattress the thickness of a magazine and stared at the ceiling and did not make a sound.

I was doing math.

Twenty-five years. Nine thousand one hundred and twenty-five days. Grant was forty-two. He’d be sixty-seven when I got out. Chloe would be fifty-four. Whatever they were building on the ruins of my life would be finished by then. Paid off. Framed on a wall.

Unless.

I didn’t know what the unless was yet. I just knew it existed, the way you know a number is wrong before you find the error.

The second week, a woman named Rox decided she wanted me.

I don’t mean romantically. I mean the way a landlord wants a building. Rox ran the laundry and three cellblocks and had a scar across her lip that made her smile look like a threat even when it wasn’t. She had two women with her everywhere. The other inmates called them the Sisters.

“You’re the rich one,” Rox said, cornering me by the showers. “Killed a man over money, I heard.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Everybody in here is innocent, princess.” She touched my hair. “You’re gonna be my friend. Friends share.”

I said no.

I’d like to tell you what happened next in a way that makes me sound brave. I can’t. Three of them, one of me, a shower stall with no cameras. I woke up in the infirmary with two cracked ribs and a nurse who didn’t ask questions because nobody at Blackridge ever did.

Dee was sitting in the chair by my bed when I opened my eyes.

“Lost my two packs,” she said. “You didn’t cry.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“I’m here because you got mail.” She held up an envelope, already opened. “They read everything. Don’t take it personal.”

It was from Grant’s attorney.

Divorce petition. Uncontested. I was to sign and return.

And underneath it, a courtesy copy of a document I’d never seen: a share transfer agreement, dated three weeks before Daniel died, moving my forty percent of Ashford Capital to my husband.

Signed by me.

In my handwriting.

Perfect. Loop on the E, the little hook on the d. I’d have believed it myself if I hadn’t known, with absolute certainty, that I never touched that pen.

“Bad news?” Dee asked.

I stared at my own forged name.

“No,” I said. “Evidence.”

Because a man who can forge his wife’s signature has done it before. And a forensic accountant with nine thousand days and nothing to lose has all the time in the world to find out where.