Part 1: A Marriage Worth Two Thousand Dollars
I married Jonah while he was serving a twelve-year prison sentence for one reason only. Every month his mother paid me two thousand dollars, and at the time, survival mattered far more than romance.
I was twenty-seven, raising my younger brother Owen after our parents were gone, and the morning everything changed, our landlord taped a final eviction notice to our apartment door. Three years later, Jonah would walk into my kitchen carrying a black box and reveal why his mother had really chosen me.
Owen noticed the eviction notice before I could hide it.
“Is it bad, Sadie?”
I folded the paper and forced a smile.
“It’s paper. Paper likes to act important.”
He didn’t smile back.
At seventeen, Owen had already learned to recognize the difference between reassurance and reality. He was too old to believe comforting lies and too young to carry burdens that should have belonged to me.
