5. Jade
— ? —
Jade
Four Years Later
The prison doors open, and I don’t move.
I stand in the threshold between the world I’ve known for 1,460 days and the world I no longer recognize, and my feet refuse to carry me forward.
The sunlight is too bright, searingly, painfully bright after years of fluorescent bulbs and gray concrete walls.
I raise my hand to shield my eyes and realize I’m trembling.
Not just my hand. All of me. Shaking like a leaf in a storm, like a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, like someone who has forgotten how to exist outside a cage.
Move, I tell myself. Move, Jade. One foot in front of the other. You remember how to walk.
But do I?
Do I remember anything about who I used to be?
The guard behind me shifts impatiently. I can feel his presence like a weight at my back, can sense his eagerness to close the door and return to his routine. I’m probably just another number to him, released early for reasons no one bothered to explain.
I take a step and the concrete beneath my feet feels different out here. Rougher, somehow. More real. I take another step, and another, and then I’m standing on the sidewalk with the prison looming behind me like a nightmare I’m not sure I’ve actually escaped.
Four years.
The thought crashes over me like a wave, stealing my breath.
Four years since they led me away in handcuffs, since I held my daughter for forty-eight hours and then watched them carry her away, since I signed divorce papers with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
Four years since I lay in my cell and stared at the ceiling and let the woman I used to be wither and die.
Nova would be four years old now.
The thought is a knife between my ribs. I don’t know what she looks like. Don’t know if she’s walking, talking, laughing, crying. Don’t know if she has my eyes or Donald’s jaw, if she’s quiet or loud, if she sleeps through the night or wakes up screaming from nightmares she can’t name.
I don’t know anything about my own daughter.
And somewhere out there, my sister is raising her.
Vivian, who stole my husband. Vivian, who framed me for crimes I didn’t commit.
Vivian, who smiled at me across a parking lot while they put me in handcuffs, who sat in that courtroom holding Donald’s hand while the jury pronounced me guilty, who took everything I loved and left me with nothing but concrete walls and the slow erosion of hope.
Does Nova call her Mom?
The thought makes me physically sick. I press my hand to my stomach - flatter now, emptier than it was when they brought me here - and try to breathe through the nausea.
Try to remember the techniques I learned in those early months, when the grief was so overwhelming I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything but lie in my cell and catalog all the ways I’d failed.
Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
It doesn’t help. It never really helped. But it gives me something to do while the world spins around me and I try to remember what freedom is supposed to feel like.
I’m standing on the sidewalk in the jeans and sweater I was wearing the day of my arrest - my seven-month checkup, a lifetime ago - and they hang off my frame like they belong to someone else.
Which they do, in a way. They belong to the woman I was before.
The pregnant woman who drove herself to the doctor’s office that morning, who was thinking about nursery colors and baby names and whether she should finally confront her husband about the perfume on his collar.
That woman doesn’t exist anymore.
I’ve lost weight. Gained it back. Lost it again.
The prison diet was inconsistent - sometimes there was too much food and I couldn’t force myself to eat it, and sometimes there wasn’t enough and I’d lie awake at night with my stomach cramping and empty.
My body has become a stranger to me, this foreign landscape of sharp angles and soft places that I don’t recognize when I catch my reflection in windows.
This is freedom, I think. This is what I’ve been waiting for.
It feels like standing on the surface of an alien planet. Like being dropped into a world that kept turning while I was frozen in place, a world that forgot I existed and moved on without me.
I have no money.
No phone.
Nowhere to go.
The realization settles into my chest like a stone.
I hadn’t thought about this - hadn’t let myself think about it, because thinking about it would have meant acknowledging that even release wouldn’t save me.
My parents haven’t visited, they believed Vivian.
Of course they believed Vivian - everyone always believes Vivian.
I have no friends left. No one who didn’t disappear the moment the headlines hit.
Where am I supposed to go?
I could walk. I could pick a direction and just start walking, put one foot in front of the other until my legs give out or I find somewhere to collapse. There are shelters, probably. Soup kitchens. Places where women with nothing end up when the world has chewed them up and spit them out.
Is that who I am now? A woman with nothing?
No.
The word rises up from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere that hasn’t quite died, despite everything.
The part of me that lay in my cell and made promises to the ceiling.
The part that counted the days and memorized every detail of Vivian’s testimony and swore that someday, somehow, I would make them pay.
I am not nothing. I am a mother. I am a survivor. I am someone who was wronged, and I will not let them win.
But standing here on the sidewalk with the sun burning my eyes and my clothes hanging off my frame, the words feel hollow. Bravado without substance. A match struck in a hurricane.
What am I supposed to do now?
***
A black sedan pulls up to the curb.
I don’t notice it at first. I’m too lost in my own spiral, too busy trying to remember how to breathe in a world that no longer has walls.
But then it stops - directly in front of me, engine idling, tinted windows hiding whoever’s inside - and some instinct from my old life makes me take a step back.
Nothing good comes from strange cars.
I learned that lesson too late. Learned it in a parking lot four years ago, when I looked across the asphalt and saw my sister smiling while they pushed me into the back of a squad car.
The window rolls down.
And I see him.
Damian.
The name hits me like a physical blow. I actually stagger, my hand flying out to catch myself on nothing, my lungs forgetting how to work.
He looks different. Older. The years have carved new lines around his eyes, etched silver into the dark hair at his temples.
There’s a weariness in his face that wasn’t there before, a heaviness that speaks of sleepless nights and battles fought and lost. But underneath all of it, it’s still him.
Those same dark eyes that used to look at me like I was the only real thing in a world full of illusions.
That same sharp jaw. That same quiet intensity that made me feel seen when everyone else looked right through me.
For a long moment, I can’t speak.
I can only stare at him, drinking in the sight of his face like water after years in the desert.
All those nights in my cell, when I’d let myself think about him - just for a moment, just before sleep pulled me under - I’d wondered if I was remembering him correctly.
If the Damian in my memories was real, or if I’d invented him.
Built him up into something more than he was because I needed something to hold onto.
But he’s here.
He’s real.
“What...” My voice comes out rusty, cracked, unused. I’ve barely spoken in months - there was no one to talk to, and the sound of my own voice had started to feel foreign. I try again, forcing the words past the lump in my throat. “What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t offer platitudes or small talk or any of the things a normal person might say to someone they haven’t seen in four years.
“Get in,” he says. His voice is calm. Steady. Like he’s been waiting for this moment. Like he’s been planning for it, preparing for it, counting down the days the same way I was. “I’ll explain everything.”
I should be suspicious.
I know I should. After everything that’s happened - after Vivian, after Donald, after a system that chewed me up and spit me out without a second glance - I should know better than to trust anyone.
Should demand answers before I get in a car with a man I haven’t seen since before my world collapsed.
But I look at Damian’s face. At the way his hands grip the steering wheel, white-knuckled, like he’s holding himself back from something.
At the way his eyes move over me - taking in the ill-fitting clothes, the lank hair, the trembling hands - and I see something there that I haven’t seen in four years.
He’s looking at me like I’m still a person. Not a number, not a headline, not a cautionary tale. A person.
And I realize, standing there on the sidewalk with the prison looming behind me and the unknown stretching ahead: I have no one else.
No family who believes me. No friends who stayed. No resources, no money, no place in this world that hasn’t been systematically stripped away.
There is only Damian.
Damian, who tried to warn me.
Damian, who held my hand in a shabby café and told me I wasn’t alone.
Damian, who lost everything too - his family, his reputation, his place in the Castillo empire - because he chose me over them.
What choice do I have?
The question echoes in my head as I reach for the door handle. As I slide into the passenger seat and pull the door closed behind me, sealing myself into this small space with a man who might be my salvation or my destruction.