I’d expected arrogance from him, or bitterness, maybe simple resentment. Instead he just looked guilty. “I did take money,” he admitted. “Eighteen thousand dollars, from a restricted foundation account. My trust got frozen once my father fell ill, and I told myself at the time I was only borrowing against my own future.”
“That’s a fairly fancy way of describing stealing.”
“Yes,” he agreed simply. “It is exactly that.”
“But I never took the six hundred thousand they pinned on me,” he added. “Roderick did that part.”
“Who’s Roderick?”
“My cousin. He’s the one who actually moved the larger funds, forged my signature across the paperwork, and let my own smaller mistake make me an easy target to blame for the rest of it.”
“Then why did you just let them bury you under it?”
Ezra glanced sideways, toward the guard standing near the door. “Because I already hated myself enough, by that point, to genuinely believe I probably deserved it anyway.”
So I signed the paperwork. He signed his half too. Just like that, I suddenly had a husband, and enough money finally coming in to actually cover our rent.
Part Two: The Timeline on the Wall
At first, I treated the whole arrangement like nothing more than a role I was playing convincingly. I visited twice each month because Augusta’s checks kept arriving reliably. I mailed letters written to sound caring enough to matter, while staying distant enough underneath to remain entirely fake.
Ezra always wrote back anyway. His handwriting came out tidy, small sketches doodled into the margins — a coffee mug here, an exhausted-looking waitress there, once even Caleb himself, drawn as “Captain Algebra,” after I’d mentioned offhand that he’d failed a math quiz that week.
At my next visit, Ezra asked, “Did Caleb end up retaking that test?”
I blinked, genuinely caught off guard. “You actually remembered that?”
“You wrote it down in your letter.”
“I write a lot of things down, generally.”
“And I actually read every single one of them.”
That admission irritated me considerably more than I expected it to. Kindness, it turns out, is a great deal harder to simply dismiss than cruelty ever is.
One night, after finishing a double shift at work, I sat cross-legged on our kitchen floor reading through Ezra’s case file. Caleb stepped carefully over the scattered papers, carrying a bowl of cereal.
“Please tell me that’s something actually fun, and not prison-husband paperwork again.”
“Prison-husband paperwork, unfortunately. Look at this specific date.”
He crouched down beside me. “October fourth.”
“Ezra was already in custody by October fourth.”
“So he couldn’t have physically signed this particular transfer order.”
“Exactly right.”
