5. Amanda
— ? —
Amanda
Sixteen months.
Sixty-nine weeks. Four hundred eighty-three days. I’ve stopped counting the hours. The hours will drive you crazy.
I know crazy now. I’ve seen it in the eyes of women who’ve been here for decades. I’ve felt it creeping at the edges of my own mind, whispering that maybe they’re right, maybe I did do it, maybe I blacked out and-
No.
I didn’t do it.
That’s the only truth I have left, and I hold onto it like a lifeline.
***
Prison has a smell they don’t tell you about.
Industrial cleaner and sweat and desperation underneath - a human smell that seeps into your skin and never washes out. I smell like it now. I’ll probably smell like it forever.
I catch my reflection in the metal mirror above the sink. The woman looking back at me is a stranger.
Hollow cheeks. Hard eyes. Hair cropped short because long hair is a liability in here - something to grab, something to use against you. I learned that lesson the second week, when a woman named Destiny tried to slam my face into a wall and got a fistful of my ponytail instead.
I don’t have a ponytail anymore.
I don’t have a lot of things anymore.
“Vance. Visitor.”
The guard’s voice echoes down the corridor. Wednesday. Two o’clock.
Roman.
He hasn’t missed a single week.
***
The visiting room is painted the color of old teeth. Yellow-gray, institutional, designed to crush any remaining hope out of the people forced to sit in it. Plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Tables with chipped surfaces. A line of vending machines humming against the far wall.
Roman is already waiting.
He looks tired. New lines around his eyes, a tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there before. He’s been fighting for me on the outside - lawyers, investigators, anyone who might listen - and it’s wearing him down.
I hate that I’m the reason.
I love that he won’t stop.
“Hey.” I slide into the chair across from him.
“Hey yourself.” His eyes move over my face, cataloging the changes. “You’re thinner.”
“The food here is terrible.”
“I’ll talk to someone.”
“Roman. It’s prison. The food is supposed to be terrible.”
He doesn’t smile. His jaw tightens, and I see his hands flex on the table - the same hands that steadied me when I stumbled between the headstones.
“I brought you something.” Roman slides a battered paperback across the table. “It’s not on the approved list, so I had to get creative.”
I pick it up. The Count of Monte Cristo.
“A prison revenge story?” I almost laugh. “Subtle.”
“I thought you might relate.” His mouth quirks. “Also, check page 247.”
I flip to it. Pressed between the pages is a photograph - me, at some charity gala, laughing at something off-camera. I don’t remember the moment. I don’t know who took it.
“Where did you get this?”
“I took it.” He looks almost embarrassed. “Three years ago. You were talking to some senator’s wife, and she said something that made you laugh - really laugh, not the polite version you do for Julian’s friends. And I thought...” He stops. Shakes his head.
“What?”
“I thought I wanted to be the reason you laughed like that someday.”
The photograph is creased. Worn at the edges. Like someone has held it too many times.
He’s been carrying it for three years.
“Roman-”
“I know it’s strange. I know I had no right. I just-” He meets my eyes. “I needed something to remind me why I was fighting. On the bad days.”
I press the photograph to my chest.
It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.
“I have news,” he says after a moment.
Something in his voice makes my stomach drop.
“Good news or bad news?”
“Both.”
I wait. He’s stalling. Roman never stalls.
“Just tell me.”
“Your mother.” He stops. Starts again. “Amanda, your mother died.”
The words don’t make sense.
They’re just sounds, arranged in an order I can’t process. My mother. Died.
“When?”
“Four days ago. I tried to get them to let you go to the funeral. I hired three different lawyers, called in every favor I had. They denied the request.”
“When was the funeral?”
“Yesterday.”
I close my eyes. I see her face - the way she looked at me in the courtroom. The disgust. The grief. The belief.
“She never came to visit,” I hear myself say. “Sixteen months, and she never-”
“She was sick, Amanda. The cancer-”
“She wasn’t too sick to come to the trial. She wasn’t too sick to watch them convict me.” My voice cracks. “She just didn’t want to see me. She died thinking I killed someone, and she didn’t even - she couldn’t even-”
I can’t finish.
The tears come without warning. Not the quiet kind - the ugly kind, the kind that rack your whole body, that make you gasp for air like you’re drowning.
I’ve been holding them in for sixteen months.
I’ve been surviving on rage and denial and the desperate hope that someday, somehow, I’ll prove my innocence and my mother will look at me again and-
And now she’s gone.
And she never knew.
Roman’s hand closes over mine.
“Ma’am, no touching.” The guard’s voice is sharp.
Roman doesn’t move.
“Sir, I said no-”
“Write me up.” His eyes don’t leave my face. “I don’t care. Write me up, ban me, do whatever you have to do. I’m not letting go of her right now.”
The guard hesitates. Something in Roman’s voice - the raw authority of it, or maybe just the barely contained violence - makes him back off.
“Five minutes,” he mutters. “Then I’m calling it in.”
Roman’s thumb strokes across my knuckles. His hand is solid. Present. The only real thing I’ve touched in sixteen months.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t fix this in time.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. It’s my family that did this to you. My brother. My-” He stops. Breathes. “I should have done more. I should have found a way.”
“You’ve been here every week.” I wipe my face with my free hand. “Every single week. Rain, holidays, that blizzard in February when they almost closed the roads. You’re the only person who-” My voice breaks again. “You’re the only person who believes me.”
“I know you didn’t do it.”
“How? How can you know? Everyone else-”
“Because I know you.” His grip tightens.
“I’ve known you for five years. I watched you work eighteen-hour days without complaining.
I watched you handle my brother’s cruelty with grace I couldn’t have mustered.
I watched you at two in the morning, barefoot and exhausted, laughing at something ridiculous while you redid a seating chart for the tenth time.
” His voice drops. “I know exactly who you are, Amanda. And you’re not capable of what they say you did. ”
I want to kiss him.
Right here, in this ugly room, with the guard watching and the cameras recording and my mother four days dead. I want to close the distance between us and press my mouth to his and feel something other than grief and rage and the slow erosion of everything I used to be.
I don’t.
Not yet. Not like this.
“You said there was good news too.”
Roman releases my hand as the guard starts moving toward us again. He leans back in his chair, and his expression shifts. Almost hopeful.
“I found someone.”
“What?”
“A witness. A man named David Okafor. He was walking home from work that night - he cuts through the neighborhood behind the mansion as a shortcut. He saw your car.” Roman’s voice drops lower.
“He saw the driver, Amanda. A young woman with long dark hair. Not you. He said she was younger, panicked, driving erratically.”
My heart stops.
“Why didn’t he come forward before?”
“He didn’t know there was a trial. He was traveling for work, overseas contract, and by the time he got back it was over. He only found out last month when his daughter showed him an article about the case.”
“Will he testify?”
“He’s already given a sworn statement. It’s been filed with the appeals court.
” Roman leans forward. “But Amanda - this is just the first step. An appeal isn’t a new trial.
It’s a legal argument that the original verdict was flawed.
David’s statement creates enough doubt to get you a hearing.
If the hearing goes well, we might get a new trial.
If we get a new trial, that’s when he actually testifies. ”
“How long?”
“Months, maybe. The legal system moves slow. But Amanda, this is real. This is happening. We’re going to get you out of here.”
I believe him.
For the first time since the verdict, I believe something good might happen.
Which is, of course, when everything goes wrong.
“Time’s up.” A different guard this time. Bigger. Meaner. “Vance, let’s go.”
“I have ten more minutes.”
“Your time got cut. Warden’s orders.”
Roman’s eyes narrow. “On what grounds?”
“Don’t need grounds. Let’s go.” He grabs my arm - hard, too hard - and yanks me to my feet.
“Get your hands off her.” Roman is standing now, and the temperature in the room drops ten degrees. “Right now.”
“Sir, you need to step back-”
“I said get your hands off her.”
The guard’s grip tightens. I feel the bruise forming already.
“Your brother sends his regards,” the guard says quietly. Just to me. Just low enough that the cameras won’t catch it. “He wanted you to know - the new witness? He’s being handled. And your boyfriend here is going to have an accident if he keeps digging.”
Roman lunges.
Two more guards appear from nowhere, and suddenly he’s being restrained, dragged backward, and I’m being pulled the other way, and the last thing I see is Roman’s face - twisted with fury, with fear, with something that looks like love - before the door slams between us.