Chapter 29
Ten months ago
February
I would do it all again
Maya
They don’t take me to a real cell.
First comes a place that feels like a forgotten corridor of hell. Windowless rooms, grimy beige walls that seem to not have been cleaned in at least ten years. The cold isn’t about temperature. It’s an absence of anything they won’t give me here. Time. Dignity. Warmth.
I’m still trying to process everything that happened since they arrested me at my own door. The way they invaded my apartment. How they gathered enough evidence to make anything I could say in my defense completely pointless.
One officer tells me to sit. Another walks past as if I’m already nothing. The hours blur. They take my earrings. My watch. My necklace.
“Personal belongings.”
Then it escalates. A female officer, her face blank with indifference, points to a filthy curtain in the corner. “Strip. Squat. Cough.”
“What?” I ask, convinced I misheard.
She doesn’t blink. “All of it off. Squat three times.”
I obey. Shaking. I hold the sobs in my throat, feeling undignified in a way I never was before.
Under the fluorescent lights, humiliation stops being something I inflicted on people I thought were beneath me.
It becomes my own form of punishment as a stranger inspects my body, treating me like trash.
Like nothing that deserves the least bit of respect.
They photograph me holding a placard. My name dissolves into a number. My face becomes data. Another officer calls out something that isn’t my name, just a sequence of digits, and I stand.
More doors. More corridors. The same sick beige. The sound changes at the women’s unit. Voices bleed through the walls. Hollow laughter. Screams without warning. They tell me the cell isn’t mine yet.
“Intake.”
I’m placed in a holding space with six other women. Not a room, a concrete pit. There aren’t even enough bunks or mattresses. This shithole makes me want to puke. It reeks of old sweat, pee, and cheap disinfectant.
I sit on the edge of a metal bench, the last empty spot. Hands folded. Spine straight as I avoid looking at any of them. One approaches. Bad neck tattoo. Hollow eyes. She steps into my space like she owns it.
“First time?”
I nod.
She studies me as the others stop what they were doing to watch us. “What’d you do?”
I hesitate, grasping for something to say. They laugh.
“With that pretty face, I bet you’re a pen thief,” she says. “So… small or big?”
“I didn’t take anything,” I say, staring past her.
“If you stole big, you’d be gone already. Real rich don’t make it to intake.”
I curl my hands into fists and hold my breath.
“Move,” she snaps. “The bench is Kim’s. You take the floor.”
“There’s nowhere—”
“No privileges, princess. Floor.”
There’s no confrontation. I move to the corner and sink against the wall, folding in on myself, careful not to touch anything damp. I swallow the urge to cry, bargain, and scream, all at once.
When the lights don’t go out, because in places like this they never really do, I lie on the freezing floor, staring at the stained ceiling. Every sound keeps me alert. Footsteps. Coughs. A muffled cry from a woman nearby.
I think about everything waiting for me. And when I realize I have nothing left... I feel the reality of what I did crushing my chest to the point of panic.
I close my eyes. But there’s no running from the consequence. Not even in my dreams.
The room is small, airless. It looks nothing like the grand, wood-paneled courtrooms I grew up seeing on television.
The chair beside mine is occupied by Mr. Miller, the public defender, a young man in an ill-fitting suit, dark circles etched deep beneath his eyes, clutching a stack of folders.
The judge reads my name the way someone opens a spam email. With zero interest, and ready to delete it.
The charges follow, stripped of context and humanity. Aggravated electronic fraud. Corporate espionage. They sound like they belong to someone else. I search for myself inside those words. The woman I know, the one with a résumé, a life.
I find nothing.
Here, I am not a person. I am paperwork. A case number. Another process waiting to be cleared from the stack.
The public defender asks for provisional release. His voice is flat, almost deferential. He doesn’t argue so much as recite: first-time offender, clean record, fixed address.
The judge doesn’t look up. “Denied. Given the technological nature of the offense, there is an imminent risk of remote destruction of evidence. Preventive detention is maintained.”
My lawyer, if that word applies, nods and closes the folder before I fully understand what just happened. He doesn’t protest. There’s no follow-up.
I played with fire, convinced I was the one controlling the flame. Now I’m the one burning.
My body reacts before my thoughts catch up. My legs shake beneath the table. My fingers go numb. A hand touches my shoulder and I don’t even flinch.
“Let’s go.”
I extend my wrists. They lead me back into the corridor, already finished with me, while the judge calls the next name and the world keeps moving.
March
I’ve lost track of how many days I’ve been here.
Nothing in this place is meant to be bearable. We wake to metal crashing against metal. We’re fed a lukewarm, colorless paste. I share space with women who have already given up on passing as human.
And I... I have to believe I’m different.
On the first day, I didn’t look away. On the second, I stayed upright. On the third, I let my disgust show when the stench hit.
I don’t know how to exist without the arrogance and superiority of someone who once controlled everything, who could have anything in a blink. And in here, it’s the only defense I have.
It’s a mistake. One I quickly learn not to repeat.
It happens in the dinner line. The “soup.”
I’m exhausted. Starving. A woman bumps into me. She’s large, her skin damp, her body reeking of sour sweat. She doesn’t even register the contact.
But I do.
I feel her arm brush against mine and I don’t think. I just react, my hand swiping down my sleeve, wiping away her touch. The sound leaves my mouth before I realize it’s there.
It’s small. Almost nothing. But it shows my disgust.
“Watch where you’re going,” I say. My tone never shifts. I speak as if she’s an inconvenience I can dismiss.
The line stops. And in that instant, I understand what I’ve done. Here, being who I am is a liability.
She turns.
“What was that, princess?”
“I said watch where you’re going. Don’t touch me,” I say, trying to seem in control.
Mistake number two. I don’t even see the movement. Her hand comes open, claw-like. She grabs my hair and yanks my head down.
“Who do you think you are?” she screams.
A hot blinding pain comes first. A knee slams into my face and I taste copper in my mouth. I hit the filthy floor. I try to rise, to impose authority I don’t have anymore.
Someone laughs. No one intervenes. A guard shouts from far away, but there’s no urgency in her voice. In the end, I limp back to the cell, my lip split, blood dripping down my chin.
I cry without sound, turned toward the damp wall. Every part of me aches. But the pain in my chest cuts deeper than any bruise.
June
I try to smile at the guard walking me down the corridor, but the scar on my lip—a thin white line, healed for months now—pulls tight. Not that it matters. Wrapped in these rags, carrying the sour reek of cheap soap, I don’t even register.
I’ve lost at least fifteen pounds. My hair, once long, sleek, the same hair Colin loved grabbing when he fucked me from behind... now lives in a greasy ponytail.
And Colin? Silence. The last I heard, he was kicked out of the company. Serves him right. But my anger hasn’t faded.
The moment I sit in the visitation room, the guard cuffs me to the table. Across from me, my public defender, James Miller, flips through his papers with the same infuriating calm he always has.
“You better do a fucking thing,” I mutter.
“What?” he asks, without lifting his head.
“It’s been hell in here,” I say. My voice is rough from disuse. “I learned to keep my mouth shut after the first time I got beaten. It didn’t matter. Even the way I look at people sets them off.”
He adjusts his glasses, unmoved. “There are a few months until your trial. The system is slow. You know that. We can build a stronger case by then.”
Months.
The word sets something off in me I was sure had gone numb. I slam my cuffed hand down on the table. I start to stand, the chair screeching as it drags back.
“I’m not staying in that hellhole for however many more months.”
The officer in the corner shifts, his hand sliding to his holster.
I inhale. The survival instinct I’ve developed in here overrides the impulse. I sit back down.
I look at the lawyer. “You know what?” I say, my voice calm now. “You’re useless. You’re fired.”
He blinks. “What?”
“Fired. I don’t know what I expected from a shitty jailhouse lawyer I’m not even paying.”
He exhales and starts gathering his folders. There’s no offense on his face, only relief.
“You’re not paying because you don’t have money, ma’am,” he says evenly. “But if you think you can manage on your own... be my guest.”
He leaves without looking back.
I sit alone until the guard comes for me. On the walk back to my cell, my thoughts race. If I stay here much longer, I’ll lose my mind. Or I’ll die in the next cafeteria fight.
The guard shoves me inside. The other women don’t even look up. I’ve become furniture.
I sit in my corner, staring at the peeling wall. And then the fog lifts.
The realization almost knocks my breath out of me, and I feel so stupid for not seeing it sooner.
The moment the robotic recording ends—”This call is from a federal prison”—the line connects. The murmur of an office on the other end sounds unreal, like it belongs to another life.
“Montgomery & Clifford, good morning,” a young, carefully trained voice says.
I don’t bother with politeness. “Tell Jonathan that Maya Fisher is on the line.”