The Man Who Looks Like Him

Chapter 5

The officer glanced down the hallway toward the back room. She could tell he was already assembling a version of the story with what evidence he already had.

“Okay.” The officer’s voice was so gentle, it made her want to cry. “I understand.”

But he didn’t. Taylor was able to see that immediately in the way he was cautious with her. It was in the way he kept his voice soft, but his body was tense. The way his eyes kept flicking toward the handcuffs clipped to his belt. It made Taylor more nervous than she already was.

Another officer appeared in the kitchen doorway and murmured something too low for Taylor to catch. The younger one’s expression shifted into something more professional. Final.

He stood. “Taylor Loudrick,” he said, and suddenly even her name sounded like it belonged to someone else, “please stand up.” She looked at him blankly. He swallowed once before continuing, seeming unsure about what he was about to say, but duty forcing him to do it anyway.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Andrew Loudrick.”

For a moment, Taylor felt like time froze around her. The words the officer spoke seem to hang midair between them. Certainly, she’d misheard him. Her mouth parted, then closed, then opened again as she fought for words.

“No,” she said finally. The word came out small, childlike. The officer reached for her wrist. “No,” she said again, louder now. Panic cracked through the numbness. “No, I called you. He was going to kill me. I call you for help. Please.”

“I understand, ma’am,” is all the officer said.

“No, you don’t.” Her voice broke on the last word, tears burning her eyes.

The officer took her arm, not roughly, but firmly enough that she knew resistance would only make this uglier. The blanket slipped from her shoulders, pooling at her feet. Metal clicked around her wrists, hard and cold.

Taylor stared down at the handcuffs in disbelief. The room tiled and the kitchen table blurred.

The red stain on Andrew’s shirt flashed behind her eyes. Then the courtroom. The gavel. The sentence.

Five years.

The bailiff nudged her gently toward the transport hallway. Taylor blinked hard against the memory before it could swallow her whole. She was no longer in the house. No longer in June. She was no longer twenty-eight and shaking blood from her hands over a kitchen sink while police photographed the body in the next room.

She was here. She was convicted and chained, walking toward a prison cell because she had survived a man no one had wanted to believe could kill her.

At the end of the corridor, a steel door buzzed open. Taylor stepped through it without looking back. And somewhere deep inside her, something that had once still believed in rescue finally died.

--

The first thing they took was her wedding ring. Not because it meant anything, but because prison took everything. She was instructed to remove all her jewelry without being spared a glance.

Taylor stared at her own hands for a second too long before twisting the ring from her finger. The skin beneath it was pale and indented, a faint band marking the place it had lived for ten years. It caught for a moment at her knuckle before sliding free. She set it in the gray plastic tray with her earrings, her watch, the hair tie from her wrist, and the thin silver chain her mother had given her when she was sixteen.

The officer snapped the tray away while giving the next order. “Shoes.” And Taylor obeyed.

The room smelled like bleach, old tile, and something sour buried underneath both. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the kind of constant electrical hum that wormed its way under her skin. The walls were painted an institutional beige that somehow made everything look more hopeless.

There were no windows. That was the first thing she’d noticed when they brought her in. No clocks. No outside. Just cinderblock, steel doors, and women who spoke to her like she was already less than human.

“Turn around.”

“Arms up.”

The officer pattered her down with brisk, practiced indifference, gloved hands checking under her arms, along her waistband, down her legs. It wasn’t cruel, just efficient, which somehow felt worse.

Taylor fixed her eyes on a dark cuff mark on the opposite wall and tried to leave her body behind. It was a trick she’d learned with Andrew. If she couldn’t stop what was happening, she could at least become smaller inside it.

“Open your mouth.”

“Lift your tongue.”

“Shake out your hair.”

Her fingers moved automatically through the tangled stands at the back of her neck. She’d been too numb to brush it before transport. It still smelled faintly of the cheap soap from county lockup, and the stale vinyl seats of the prison van.

“Take off your bra.” At this, Taylor paused. The officer finally met her eyes. “You want to spend the night standing here, Loudrick?”

Heat rushed up her neck. Her fingers trembled as she reached beneath the hem of the oversized, county-issued T-shirt and unclasped it. She kept her face blank as she slid it free through one sleeve and dropped it into the tray.

Humiliation sat hot and metallic at the back of her throat. She had through the courtroom would be the worst part.

She was wrong.