My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 06

My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. Chapter 06: Any Favorite Passage

Four years is a long time to build a person.

Margaret Vale got a birth certificate in year four. A Social Security card in year five. A Maine driver’s license, mailed to a post office box in Augusta that Dee’s nephew checked once a month for fifty dollars

and no questions.

She opened her first account with the warden’s money. Then a second. Then an LLC, then a second LLC that owned the first, a structure so boring no auditor would look twice. Curtis Hollis signed everything I put in front of him because I explained it in words he didn’t understand and he’d rather die than admit it.

By year six, Margaret Vale was worth two point one million dollars.

Curtis Hollis had never seen her face.

I was moved to the library permanently. Guards came to me with their taxes, their divorces, their kids’

college money. Bergen brought me a cake on my birthday, which was the strangest thing that has ever

happened to me. I helped a girl named Tasha pass her GED and cried in the bathroom afterward, and I still

don’t know why.

Dee’s parole came up in year six.

She’d been denied twice. She sat across from me the morning of the hearing in a blouse she’d ironed with

a hot water cup, and her hands were shaking.

“Thirty-six years,” she said. “I was twenty-five. I don’t know how to use a phone.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“You’ll be in here.”

“Not forever.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Elena. Whatever you’re doing in that office. If they find it-”

“They won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Dee.” I took her hand. “Go get your parole.”

She was back in two hours. She didn’t say anything. She just sat down on my bunk and stared at the wall, and I sat next to her, and after a while she said, “Hope’s a dangerous thing in here. Drives a woman crazy.”

I didn’t argue.

The inspection came a week later

Surprise sweep. Every cell in B-block. Guards dumping mattresses, shaking out shoes, tearing up the girls’

photographs just because they could. I stood against the wall with the Bible in my hands, because I always

had it in my hands, because a woman who reads Scripture is invisible.

Then Curtis Hollis walked in.

He’d never come to a sweep. Wardens didn’t. But there he was in my doorway, watching Bergen turn my

footlocker inside out, and I understood with perfect clarity that this was about me.

“Nothing, sir,” Bergen said.

Hollis nodded. Then he held out his hand.

“May I?”

I gave him the Bible.

He weighed it in his palm. Turned it over. Ran his thumb along the edge of the pages, right along the seam where I’d cut. My heart was a stone in my mouth.

“Any favorite passage, Mrs. Ashford?”

I heard myself answer. “Watch ye therefore. For ye know not when the master of the house cometh.”

He smiled.

“Mark 13:35.” He opened the cover-the front cover, the safe cover, the pages I’d left whole-and read the

inscription I’d written there in my neatest hand: Salvation lies within. -C.H.

Something moved in his face. Pride, I think. The pleasure of a man who believes he’s saved someone.

He handed it back.

“Keep reading,” he said, and left.

I stood there holding six years of my life, Margaret Vale’s entire existence, three account numbers and a Passport photo and the full, itemized record of every bribe Curtis Hollis had ever taken, all of it two inches

from his hand.

That night Dee whispered through the vent, “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“You sounded funny at dinner.”

I lay in the dark and pressed the Bible to my chest.

“Dee,” I said. “Hope’s not dangerous. It’s the only thing in here they can’t search.”