Miss CEO, EX-Convict

The clothes they gave me back didn't fit anymore. Nothing did. Three years folds a person down to a different shape. I knew that now, standing in the intake room with a plastic bag in my hands, looking at the blazer I'd worn to my own sentencing. I used to run a company in that blazer, before a judge decided I'd stolen from it. Embezzlement, they called it, money that never touched my hands, signed away under my name by somebody else's pen. Now the shoulders hung loose. Two sizes too big, maybe three. A guard said something about processing times. I didn't catch all of it. I was watching a fly hit the window glass. It hit it again. It kept hitting it. I signed where they told me to sign. I didn't read it. I'd read enough documents in my life to know that reading one more wouldn't change what came next. Outside, the light hurt more than I expected. I stood on the curb and let my eyes adjust, and for a second I thought about how I used to complain that my old office got too much afternoon sun. Then I thought about nothing at all for a while, which was its own kind of relief. No car from Julian, my ex-fiancé, the man I'd almost married the same year I went to prison for stealing from his family's company. I'd told myself I wasn't expecting one, and I wasn't, not really, but my stomach did something anyway when I saw the black sedan idling at the end of the lot. Not his car. I knew his car. This one had tinted windows and a driver who didn't get out. I almost walked past it. The back window rolled down two inches. A hand set an envelope on the ledge, then the window went back up before I could see who it belonged to. My name was on the front. Not the name from the trial. The old one. The one from before I was somebody's cautionary tale. I opened it standing right there on the curb, because three years in a cell teaches you that waiting for a better moment is usually just another way of being afraid. Inside: a single page torn from a ledger I'd never seen before. A signature at the bottom I couldn't place, not at first, though something about it snagged at me right before I would have remembered whose hand it was. Under the ledger page, a business card. Kestrel Dynamics. No name printed on it, just a title. Director of Strategic Acquisitions. I turned the card over. On the back, four words in handwriting that wasn't the same as the ledger's. You'll need a new name. Below that, a single letter. E. My knees didn't buckle. I wanted to say later that they had, because it would've made a better story, but the truth was my body just stood there while my mind ran through every E I'd ever known, every E who'd have a reason to send me a signature and then tell me to bury my own name along with it. There was only one E who fit, and she'd been dead for three years. Everyone said so. There'd been a funeral. I hadn't gone, because I was already in a cell by then, but I'd seen the photo in the paper, the one where the family stood in black and Julian's face in it didn't look like his. Something in it was missing. My sister stopped visiting after the first year. Dana said she couldn't reconcile the woman on the stand with the one who used to drive her to school, and I didn't have the energy left to argue with her about which version was real. Clearing my name wouldn't just be about walking back into a boardroom. It would be about picking up the phone and having her answer. The sedan was already pulling away. I watched it go and didn't run after it, because running after cars was for people who still believed they were owed an explanation. I put the ledger page and the card back in the envelope. My hands were steady. I noticed that and nothing else. Across the street was a bus stop bench. I sat down on the end of it that didn't have gum stuck to the slats. I still had the plastic bag with my old clothes in my lap. My sock had slipped down inside my shoe at some point in the last twenty minutes and I hadn't noticed until just now, and I didn't fix it. I mean, I thought, and then didn't finish the thought, because there wasn't an end to it yet. I'd never once let myself think about Julian's mother. Not once in three years. Not during the trial, not in my cell, not in the letters I wrote and tore up and never sent to Julian. I'd let the whole thing sit on one man's shoulders because it was simpler that way, and simple was the only thing I'd had room for. The ledger page said otherwise. And a dead woman's initial said otherwise twice. My phone had been off for three years, dead in a box somewhere I'd have to go pick up. I didn't need it yet. I needed somewhere to go that wasn't my old life. That life wouldn't take me back anyway, not the apartment, not the office, not the name on my own driver's license. I looked at the card again. Kestrel Dynamics. I'd heard the name before, in a boardroom, said by someone who didn't like saying it, back when I still sat in rooms like that. A phone number was written on the bottom corner of the card, different ink than the four words above it. Someone had added it after the fact, like they knew I'd need it before I did. Down the block, a payphone. I hadn't seen one of those since before the trial. I folded the card into my palm and didn't move toward it yet. Not because I needed to think it over. I already knew I'd call. I just wanted one more minute of sitting on a bench that didn't belong to anyone, before I became whoever the card wanted me to be. I looked down at the letter one more time. E. Dead women didn't write notes. Dead women didn't know what name a person would need before that person knew it herself.