My Husband Framed Me. I Took It All. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Taycheedah

In prison Annika slides her wedding ring under the glass to Carter and promises to take it all; then her lawyer and the detective who arrested her are waiting with a photo that was supposed to be gone.

They took my clothes in a room with no windows.

A guard with a clipboard told me to bend, cough and hand over my jewelry.

I had nothing left but the ring.

"You keep that," she said. "Wedding bands are allowed."

I put it back on.

I hated that I did.

Taycheedah is where Wisconsin keeps its women.

It smells like floor wax and boiled cabbage, and every door slams the same way.

They gave me a grey jumpsuit and a bunk over a woman who didn't look up from her crossword.

"Murder?" she asked.

"I didn't do it."

"Everybody says that."

She filled in a word.

"Good news is, nobody here asks twice."

I lay awake and pressed my thumb against the little white scar I got when I was sixteen.

I dropped my mother's left earring on a tile floor that year, and a pearl chipped, and I cried for an hour.

My mother put it in my palm and said, "Now it's really yours. It remembers you."

The earring in that evidence bag had no chip.

I had looked at it for four days of trial and not one person had made me say that out loud.

On the third morning, a guard called my number and said, "Visitor."

I thought it was my lawyer.

It was Carter.

He sat down on the other side of the glass in a charcoal coat, his hair freshly cut, and picked up the phone.

I picked up mine because I wanted to see his face.

"You look thin," he said.

"You look rested."

He smiled.

"I brought you something."

He held two sheets of paper against the glass.

The top one said Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.

The one underneath said Quitclaim Deed, and it had my name typed on a line.

"The house is already sold, but the lawyers want your signature to keep everything clean," he said.

"Sign, and I'll put some money on your books every month."

"How much?"

"Fifty dollars."

I almost laughed.

That was what he used to spend on tips at Lars's Christmas parties.

"Where's Chloe?"

"She's grieving, Annika. We all are."

He said it so gently.

I looked at the chip in the wall behind his head and thought about the first time he said my name like that.

A rooftop, a hot July, a man with a good jaw who told me I was the smartest person in the building.

I was twenty-five and I had believed him for seven years.

I put the phone down on my shoulder, slowly, and I took off the ring.

It left a pale groove on my finger.

I set it on the little metal ledge under the glass, and I pushed it toward the slot where visitors pass messages.

"Give that to Chloe," I said into the phone.

"She'll like it. She likes everything of mine."

His smile finally slipped.

Not much.

A tightening around the mouth.

"Don't be dramatic."

"I'm not signing."

"Then I'll file without you, and a judge will give me everything because you're in here."

"Then take it," I said.

"Take the house and the couch and the dishes."

I leaned toward the glass.

"I'm going to take it all back, Carter."

"The house. The firm. Every dollar you stole."

"And how will you do that from in here?"

"I don't know yet."

I held his eyes.

"But you're the one who taught me to read a ledger."

He laughed, one short breath, and hung up.

He walked out without looking back, and I realized I had never once seen him look back.

The guard took me to a little room with a table and a fluorescent light that hummed.

"Attorney visit," she said. "Fifteen minutes."

I thought, I don't have an attorney anymore.

The door opened, and a woman in a green cardigan stepped inside with a tin of peppermints in her hand.

She had short grey hair and reading glasses on a chain.

"Rosalyn Gillis," she said.

"I do appeals. I've been up since four. Sit."

I sat.

Behind her, someone leaned against the wall with his arms folded.

A big man in a grey wool coat, with a nose that had been broken once.

I knew him.

He was the one who put the cuffs on me, and the one staring at my sister's ears.

"Soren Falk," he said.

"Detective Falk. I arrested you."

"I remember," I said.

He took a photograph out of his coat and laid it on the table facing me.

It was a close-up of a pearl on a gloved hand, in front of a desk.

You could see the back of the post, and it was a little silver butterfly clip.

"I wrote down what that was in my first report," he said.

"A page of that report went missing before your trial."

He put one finger on the picture.

"I kept the photo."

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