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.
