PART 1 — THE CORRIDOR
Ten years.
That is what Judge Arlette Vinnicombe gave me at four minutes past eleven on a Thursday morning at the Cassell County Courthouse, for a fraud of one million nine hundred and forty thousand dollars committed through the company where I was chief financial officer.
The transfers carried my electronic signature. The sessions came from my machine. Four phantom vendors had been approved with my credentials, on days I was at my desk.
Everything pointed at me.
My husband knew exactly how well it pointed at me, because he had built every piece of it.
They cuffed me at the defence table and walked me out into the corridor, and about forty people came out of that courtroom behind us and stood along the walls.
Brett stepped into my path.
He had Brynn on his other arm. She is twenty-nine and she was wearing a cream coat and she had the good sense, at least, to look at the floor.
He took hold of my left hand — my hands were cuffed in front — and worked my wedding ring off my finger with his thumb. I closed my fist. It came off anyway.
He put it in his jacket pocket machen.
