⸻
“Visit twice a month,” Deborah told me, sliding a folder of paperwork across her kitchen table like we were negotiating a business contract, which I suppose, in every practical sense, we were. “Write letters regularly. Let the parole board and the appeals court see he still has family standing behind him.”
⸻
Our wedding happened behind scratched visitation glass, a bored guard watching the clock the entire fifteen minutes it took. I expected Silas to be angry about the whole arrangement, or cold, maybe even cruel about being handed a stranger for a wife under these circumstances.
Instead, he was gentle.
⸻
He remembered my brother’s birthday without me ever mentioning the exact date twice. He asked, every single visit, whether I’d actually eaten that day, the way someone asks when they genuinely want the honest answer. He sent letters with small, careful sketches doodled into the margins — a bird once, a coffee cup another time, small unremarkable things that somehow made those envelopes feel considerably heavier than the two thousand dollars folded inside my own conscience every month.
⸻
At first, I only acted like I cared. It felt easier that way, professional almost, a performance I could step out of the moment I closed my apartment door each evening.
Then, somewhere across those first several months, I stopped acting.
⸻
I started reading through his case files late at night, initially out of simple curiosity, then with something closer to obsession. Missing signatures where they should have been present. Dates on financial transfers that didn’t line up with dates in the foundation’s own internal records. A key witness who testified against Silas at trial and then left the state entirely within three weeks, never once appearing for any follow-up proceedings.
⸻
When everyone else called Silas a thief, I stood outside courthouses with folders pressed against my chest, begging any lawyer willing to spare me ten minutes to take another look at what I’d found.
Silas never once asked me why I was doing it.
By then, I loved him. I think some part of me understood that fact before I ever fully admitted it out loud, even to myself.
⸻
Three years after our prison wedding, the truth finally came out in full. Silas’s cousin, Trent, had been quietly moving money out of the Ashford Family Foundation for almost two years before Silas’s arrest, forging Silas’s signature on the transfer authorizations, and letting the entire weight of the fraud land on someone else’s shoulders when auditors finally noticed the discrepancies.
⸻
The day Silas walked free, I genuinely believed he’d run straight into my arms the moment he cleared the prison’s front gate.
Instead, his face tightened the second the doors opened, like freedom itself had somehow bruised him on the way through.
⸻
Then he reached for my hand instead, steady and certain.
“Come home with me,” he said.
⸻
For one full week afterward, I believed we’d survived the worst of it together, that whatever came next would simply be the easier, gentler chapter neither of us had gotten to have yet.
⸻
Then, on the eighth night, Silas set a small black box down on our kitchen table, the surface scuffed enough that it clearly wasn’t new.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Now it’s my turn to be honest,” he said.
⸻
I tried to smile, some nervous instinct still hoping this might turn out to be nothing.
“Silas, don’t scare me.”
His expression shifted, and my skin went cold before he’d said another word.
⸻
