If you mention my name again, I promise you’ll be going straight back to prison,” my sister warned as she tossed an envelope stuffed with cash onto the ground before me.
Only nineteen days had passed since my release. The sound of a slamming door still made me startle awake at night. Now Monica was threatening me outside a house that no longer truly belonged to me.
And on her wrist was the watch our father had given me before his death.
“Pick up your money,” I told her. “You already took four years of my life. You’re not buying the ones I have left.”
Monica smiled coldly.
“You still think you can win.”
To explain how my sister and I ended up facing each other that day, I need to begin with my release from the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
My name is Rebecca Hale. I’m thirty-six years old, and I spent almost four years behind bars serving a five-year sentence for fraud I hadn’t committed.
