4. Jade #2
Embezzlement. Fraud. In their eyes, I’m guilty of everything. But the only thing I’m truly guilty of is trusting my husband and my viper of a sister.
Marcus puts a hand on my arm, steadying me. I don’t realize I’m swaying until I feel his grip. The room has started to spin, the fluorescent lights bleeding into halos, the faces of the jury blurring into a smear of judgment.
I don’t hear the rest of the trial. The guards are already moving toward me, their hands on my arms, their bodies blocking my view of the gallery. But through the gap between them, I see her.
Vivian.
Sitting in the front row. Holding Donald’s hand. Her head tilted against his shoulder like a woman who’s been through an ordeal and found comfort in the arms of someone who loves her.
And she’s smiling.
It’s small, so small that no one else would notice. Just the faintest curve of her lips, the slightest gleam in her eyes. The smile of someone who’s watched all the pieces fall exactly where she placed them.
I did this, that smile says. And no one will ever know.
The doors close behind me, and the last thing I see is my sister’s face.
I don’t scream. I don’t cry. I don’t do anything at all.
I just let them lead me away, back to my cell, back to the cold gray walls that have become my entire world.
And I let myself disappear.
***
They let me give birth in the prison hospital.
Let me - as if it’s a privilege. As if they’re doing me a favor by allowing me to bring my daughter into the world in a room that smells like antiseptic and despair, with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and guards stationed outside the door.
They shackle me to the bed.
I don’t understand it at first - don’t understand why they’re fastening metal cuffs around my ankles while I’m gasping through contractions, while my body is tearing itself apart to bring a new life into the world. “Protocol,” the nurse says, not meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s protocol.”
Protocol.
I scream through eighteen hours of labor with chains around my ankles and no one to hold my hand.
There’s no Damian here. He tried to visit, once, in the weeks before the trial - I saw his name on the visitor log, saw that he’d been turned away.
I don’t know why. Maybe Donald blocked him.
Maybe Vivian did. Maybe it doesn’t matter because I’m alone anyway, I’ve always been alone, and the one person who might have stood beside me has been erased from my life as thoroughly as if he never existed.
Damian.
I think about him sometimes, in the dark hours between midnight and dawn when the prison goes quiet and my thoughts turn sharp and dangerous.
I think about his hands wrapped around mine in that shabby little café.
I think about the way he looked at me - like I was real, like I mattered, like I was worth saving.
He tried to save me.
And I dragged him down with me.
The last I heard, he’d been cut off from the family. Donald accused him of being part of the conspiracy, and even though there was no evidence - nothing but those photos of us holding hands - it was enough. The Castillo name is everything, and Damian chose me over it.
And what did that get him?
Nothing. Nothing but exile and silence and the knowledge that he ruined his life for a woman who couldn’t be saved.
I hope he hates me. I hope he’s moved on, found someone else, forgotten my name. It would be easier if he hated me. Easier than imagining him out there somewhere, thinking about me, wondering what happened, carrying the weight of our almost-love like a stone in his chest.
***
Nova comes into the world screaming.
That’s the first thing I notice, the sound of her voice, thin and furious and alive. They place her on my chest for one blinding, beautiful moment, and I look down at her wrinkled face, her tiny fists, her dark hair, her eyes squeezed shut against the harsh hospital light.
You’re here. You’re real. You’re mine.
“Nova,” I whisper, pressing my lips to her forehead. “Your name is Nova. It means new star. Because that’s what you are, a new beginning. A light in the darkness.”
She quiets at the sound of my voice. Her fingers curl around mine, impossibly small, impossibly perfect.
I get forty-eight hours with her.
Forty-eight hours of holding her while she sleeps, of learning the shape of her face, of memorizing every detail because I know - I know - it’s all I’m going to get.
Forty-eight hours of pretending the world outside doesn’t exist, that it’s just me and my daughter in this small white room, that nothing bad has ever happened and nothing bad ever will.
And then they come.
The social worker has kind eyes and a gentle voice, and I hate her for both of those things.
I hate her for the clipboard in her hands, for the paperwork that says my daughter is being placed in temporary custody, for the careful way she explains that “given the circumstances” and “in the best interest of the child” and all those other phrases that mean: you are not fit to be a mother.
“No.” The word tears out of me, raw and bleeding. “No, please. You can’t - she’s mine. She’s mine.”
“Mrs. Castillo-”
“Moreno.” I’m crying now, ugly and desperate, clutching Nova to my chest like I can protect her from what’s coming. “My name is Moreno. And you can’t take her. Please. Please.”
But they can.
They do.
The social worker pries my daughter from my arms with practiced efficiency, and I scream, the kind of sound I didn’t know I was capable of making. It echoes off the hospital walls, bounces down the hallways, and accomplishes nothing.
Nova is crying too. I can hear her wails as they carry her away, getting fainter and fainter until there’s nothing left but silence.
And I lie there in that hospital bed, shackled and empty, and I feel something inside me break.
Not crack. Not bend.
Break.
Like a bone snapping clean in two. Like something that will never heal right, no matter how much time passes, no matter what happens next.
***
They bring me divorce papers three weeks later.
I’m sitting in the visitation room - a cold, beige space with plastic chairs and a table bolted to the floor - when the guard slides the folder across to me.
Donald’s lawyer sent them. Of course Donald couldn’t be bothered to come himself.
Of course he couldn’t look me in the eye while he dismantled the last pieces of the life we built together.
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE
Jade Moreno.
I stare at my maiden name, printed in black and white, and I feel the last thread connecting me to my old life snap and fall away.
The terms are brutal. I get nothing - no settlement, no assets, no claim to anything we shared during three years of marriage.
The prenup I signed (stupidly, trustingly, because I loved him and believed he loved me) protects all of his wealth.
And my conviction means I’ve forfeited any right to contest.
But that’s not the part that destroys me.
CUSTODY OF MINOR CHILD NOVA CASTILLO, section 7 reads. Full custody awarded to father, Donald James Castillo. Maternal visitation rights: pending review upon completion of sentence.
Pending review.
Which means never. Which means Donald gets to raise my daughter, gets to tell her whatever he wants about the mother she’ll never know, gets to let Vivian play stepmother while I rot in a cell and count the days until I’m allowed to apply for pending review.
My hands shake as I sign the papers. My breasts ache with milk that has nowhere to go - they gave me pills to dry it up, but the ache remains, a phantom pain for a phantom child. I sign my name on line after line, watching the letters blur through my tears, and I think about Nova.
About the way her fingers curled around mine.
About the forty-eight hours I got to be her mother.
About all the years stretching ahead of me, empty and endless, without her.
The guard takes the papers away. I go back to my cell. I lie down on my hard cot, stare at the ceiling, and let myself die.
Not literally. My body keeps breathing. My heart keeps beating. My lungs keep filling with air and pushing it back out again, because that’s what bodies do, that’s the terrible persistence of biology.
But the woman I used to be - the one who believed in love, who trusted her sister, who thought the world was basically fair and good people eventually won - she’s gone.
She died in that hospital room, with the sound of her daughter’s cries fading into silence.
What’s left is something else. Something harder. Something that lies in the dark and stares at the ceiling and makes a different kind of promise.
I’m going to get out of here.
I’m going to find the truth.
I’m going to burn them all to the ground.
It’s not hope. It’s not healing.
It’s survival. And right now, it’s all I have.