I MARRIED A PRISONER FOR MONEY WHILE HE WAS SERVING A TWELVE-YEAR SENTENCE — BUT AFTER HIS CONVICTION WAS OVERTURNED, HE CAME TO MY APARTMENT WITH A BLACK BOX AND SAID, “NOW IT’S MY TURN TO BE HONEST.”
When I agreed to marry Silas, I didn’t care whether he was innocent. He’d been convicted of stealing from his family’s charitable foundation, and honestly, at the time, his guilt or innocence felt like someone else’s problem to sort out.
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I was twenty-seven, drowning in overdue rent notices, raising my younger brother, Caleb, mostly alone since our parents weren’t in any position to help either of us. So when Silas’s mother, Deborah, offered me two thousand dollars a month to become his wife on paper, I said yes before shame had the chance to catch up with me properly.
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“Visit twice a month,” Deborah told me, sliding a folder of paperwork across her kitchen table like we were negotiating a business contract, which I suppose, in every practical sense, we were. “Write letters regularly. Let the parole board and the appeals court see he still has family standing behind him.”
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Our wedding happened behind scratched visitation glass, a bored guard watching the clock the entire fifteen minutes it took. I expected Silas to be angry about the whole arrangement, or cold, maybe even cruel about being handed a stranger for a wife under these circumstances.
Instead, he was gentle.
