I didn’t touch it.
I took a photograph of it instead.
Then I walked the two miles back to the bus stop.
To understand how we got to that moment, I have to go back to the day I walked out of the women’s pr*son in Marysville.
My name is Rachel Cooper. I’m thirty-six, and I served almost four years of a five-year sentence for a fr*ud I never committed.
Before pr*son, I owned a medical supply distribution company, a house in Dublin, Ohio, and a husband I considered my best friend.
When I got out, all I had was a bag of clothes, seventy-five dollars in gate money, and a conviction that popped up every time someone ran a background check on me.
The gate guard that morning was a woman named Officer Benning who’d been decent to me for four years.
She walked me to the bus.
