4. Jade
— ? —
Jade
Present Day
The cell is cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and makes a home there, the kind that no amount of pacing or curling into yourself can shake.
The walls are gray concrete, rough and unfinished, and somewhere water is dripping, a slow, maddening rhythm that marks the seconds I can no longer count.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here.
Three hours. Maybe six. Maybe a day. Time has become something slippery and strange, measured not in minutes but in the spaces between contractions of panic, the moments when my heart rate slows enough for me to breathe, before the terror floods back in and drowns me all over again.
They processed me like I was already guilty.
Took my clothes - the soft blue maternity dress I’d worn to my checkup, the one with the tiny flowers that made me feel almost pretty - and handed me an orange jumpsuit that won’t button over my belly.
The fabric is rough against my skin, scratchy and thin, and I can feel my daughter shifting inside me, restless, as if she knows something is terribly wrong.
I know, baby. I know.
My hands haven’t stopped shaking since they put the cuffs on me.
I keep looking at my wrists, at the red marks the metal left behind, and thinking: this isn’t real.
This can’t be real. But the marks are there.
The jumpsuit is there. The cold gray walls are there.
And no matter how many times I close my eyes and pray to wake up, the nightmare doesn’t end.
***
The interrogation room is worse than the cell.
Fluorescent lights that hum and flicker, casting everything in a sickly yellow glow. A metal table bolted to the floor. Two detectives who look at me like I’m already convicted, already guilty, already the villain of a story I didn’t know was being written.
“You transferred $400,000 to offshore accounts,” the woman detective says with a sharp face and sharper eyes, and she watches me the way a cat watches a mouse it’s already decided to kill.
“Over the past six months. Small amounts at first, then larger. All from accounts you had authorized access to.”
“I didn’t.” My voice comes out thin, reedy, nothing like the voice I used to have. “I’ve never transferred anything. I don’t even handle the finances - Donald always said it was too complicated for me to-”
“We have the records, Mrs. Castillo.” The other detective - a man, younger, with the kind of bored expression that says he’s already decided this is an open-and-shut case - slides a folder across the table. “Your login credentials. Your IP address. Your signature on the authorization forms.”
I stare at the papers. At the signatures that look exactly like mine, the same loops, the same flourishes, the same slight uptick on the final letter of my name.
But I didn’t sign these.
I didn’t sign these.
“That’s not possible.” My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold the papers. “Someone must have forged - someone got into my accounts-”
“Are you saying someone framed you?”
“Yes!” The word comes out desperate, wild. I sound crazy. I can hear how crazy I sound, and I can’t stop it. “My sister. She has access to all my passwords, my banking information, everything. She’s been - she and my husband-”
“Your sister is the one who discovered the fraud.” Detective Morrison’s voice is flat. Final. “She came forward with evidence weeks ago. She’s been cooperating fully with our investigation.”
Cooperating.
The word lands like a knife between my ribs.
Of course she’s cooperating. Of course she came forward. She wrote this script months ago, and now she’s playing the role of the grieving, betrayed sister while I sit here in an orange jumpsuit trying to explain that everything they think they know is a lie.
“She’s lying.” I’m crying now. I can feel the tears streaming down my face, hot and useless. “She’s been sleeping with my husband. They’ve been having an affair. She set me up-”
“Mrs. Castillo.” The detective’s tone shifts to something almost like pity, which is somehow worse than the accusation. “I understand this is difficult. But making wild accusations against a cooperating witness isn’t going to help your case.”
Wild accusations.
That’s what they think this is. That’s what everyone will think. Pregnant woman, caught stealing, desperately blaming her sister to avoid consequences. I can already see the headlines. I can already feel the weight of public opinion crushing me before I’ve had a chance to speak.
“I want a lawyer,” I whisper. “Please. I want a lawyer.”
But even as I say it, I know: no lawyer is going to save me from this. Vivian has been too careful. Too thorough. She’s spent months - maybe years - building this trap, and I walked right into it.
I think about her face in that parking lot. The smile. The satisfaction. The way she watched them put me in the back of that squad car like she was watching the final scene of a play she’d been directing since the day I said “I do.”
How long? I wonder, as they lead me back to my cell. How long has she been planning this?
And then I realize: it doesn’t matter.
She won.
***
The days blur together.
Jail becomes prison becomes a series of identical gray mornings, each one bleeding into the next like watercolors left out in the rain.
I have a public defender, a tired man named Marcus who takes on too many cases and can’t possibly give any of them the attention they deserve.
He does his best. I can see him trying, see the frustration in his eyes when the prosecution’s evidence mounts and mounts and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
“The documents are convincing,” he admits during one of our meetings, rubbing his temples like he’s fighting a headache that never ends. “Whoever created them knew what they were doing. But without proof that someone else had access-”
“My sister had access. I told you. I gave her all my passwords, my login information - she offered to handle my accounts when I was sick through the pregnancy, and I let her, because she’s my sister and I trusted her-”
“And she denies it. She says you always handled your own accounts.” He looks at me with something like pity. “It’s your word against hers, Jade. And right now, she has Donald, the Castillo family lawyers, and a paper trail that all point to you.”
My word against hers.
My word has never been worth anything. Not compared to Vivian, who smiles and sparkles and makes everyone believe she’s the good one, the loyal one, the sister who reluctantly came forward because she couldn’t bear to watch her family be destroyed.
I stop eating.
Not on purpose, exactly. The food is terrible - gray meat, soggy vegetables, bread that tastes like cardboard - but that’s not why.
It’s just that every time I try to swallow, I think about Nova.
About the life she’s going to have, born in a prison to a mother everyone believes is a criminal.
About the way she’ll grow up hearing stories about me, none of them true, all of them damning.
The nausea isn’t just morning sickness anymore. It’s grief, taking up residence in my body, making it impossible to keep anything down.
My daughter kicks inside me, demanding attention, demanding acknowledgment, and I press my hand to my belly and whisper apologies I know she can’t hear.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You deserve better than this. You deserve better than me.
***
The trial is a performance I’m not allowed to participate in.
I sit at the defense table in my orange jumpsuit - they wouldn’t let me wear real clothes, wouldn’t let me look like a person instead of a convict - and I watch the prosecution build their case brick by brick.
Bank records. Email logs. Authorization forms with signatures that look exactly like mine because they were carefully, painstakingly forged by someone who knows my handwriting as well as her own.
Vivian takes the stand on the third day.
She’s wearing a soft gray dress, modest and elegant, with her hair pulled back in a way that makes her look younger, more vulnerable.
She cries when the prosecutor asks her about discovering the fraud.
Dabs at her eyes with a tissue. Speaks in a voice that trembles with perfectly calibrated emotion.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she says, looking at the jury with those wide, innocent eyes. “She’s my sister. I loved her. I trusted her.” A pause. A shaky breath. “But when I found the evidence... I knew I had to come forward. I couldn’t let her keep hurting the people I care about.”
The people she cares about.
Donald, she means. Who sits in the gallery behind her, his jaw tight with righteous anger, his hand reaching out to squeeze her shoulder when she finishes testifying.
Donald, who was sleeping with her for over a year.
Donald, who never loved me, who probably never even liked me, who married me because I was convenient and quiet and I made him look good at parties.
Donald, who is going to take my daughter and raise her with my sister, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I try to testify in my own defense. Marcus says I have to, says the jury needs to hear my side. But when I open my mouth to speak, the words that come out sound hollow. Desperate. Exactly like what a guilty person would say.
“I didn’t do this. My sister set me up. She’s been having an affair with my husband and she framed me to get rid of me.”
The prosecutor smiles. That’s all he does - just smiles - and I know I’ve lost.
Wild accusations. Paranoid delusions. A pregnant woman, caught red-handed, blaming everyone but herself.
I can see it on the jury’s faces. They’ve already decided.
***
“The prosecution has demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt,” the judge says, her voice echoing through the courtroom like a death knell, “that the defendant engaged in systematic financial fraud against Castillo Enterprises.”
I stand at the defense table, my hands on my belly, my daughter rolling and kicking as if she knows her mother’s world is ending.