The letters began arriving by the dozens shortly after my picture appeared in the paper, sealed with lipstick blots and doused in acrid perfume. “It’s called hybristophilia,” the prison chaplain said. In manic scrawls and breathless bubble letters, they pleaded for my attention, pledged their willingness. Some sent photographs; cheeky cheesecake shots, most with scarves pulled taut across their wrists and necks in a depraved parody of my alleged crimes. I kept a few, I admit. But I had little regard for their senders, who addressed their billets-doux not to me, but to the lurid names I’d been given in screaming tabloid headlines.
There was one, however, whose letters always came unadorned and typed neatly on crisp, university stationery. She was a law student, and her messages were full of legal stratagems, precedents, and case law – a welcome respite from the vulgar fantasies of the others. “I heard about you on a podcast,” she explained. Much of it was over my head, to be sure. But I devoured the letters, not only because they seemed to sketch a plausible path to freedom, but because for the first time since my arrest it seemed that someone believed in my innocence.
Our letters grew warmer and more frequent as the years went on, and though I fought, with all my remaining will, to suppress any notion of hope, her ebullience was contagious. She believed in me, and I came to believe in her. “Together,” she wrote, “we’re unstoppable.” I asked the chaplain if he had a name for our budding rapport.
“Appeals courtship?” he quipped.
Watching her from the defense table, I marveled at her dexterity, the way she untangled the facts of my case, the circumstances of my apprehension, and the farce of my trial, then pulled the loose ends back together in a way that could only point to one conclusion. The jury was wooed. A technicality, the district attorney told the press. Nothing more. I was paroled into her custody, and when we met outside the prison gates, embracing for the first time, the words spilled out of me. “I love you, too,” she replied.
Out in the world, I felt useless, but as ever was borne up by her belief in me. I followed her around like a puppy, deep in her thrall and forever in her debt. We stayed up to all hours, talking, getting to know one another for real, as people, sharing stories of our childhoods, our fears, our hopes, our disappointments. Blissful evenings and languorous mornings, imagining what might be—what could be, together.
As the weeks wore on, I sensed a growing impatience. “You’re holding back,” she told me, kneading my shoulders with her strong hands. “You have to trust me.” I didn’t know what she meant. I had poured myself out to her, emptied myself of all I was; I feared it might not be enough. Our conversations began to end in great, gaping pauses, her deep, searching eyes and eager face hungry for more, waiting for something, demanding a satisfaction I didn’t know how to give. I caught her, once or twice, sifting through the casework, as if nostalgic for the walls that once stood between us. She walked through the house with her earbuds in, lost in thought, as if I wasn’t there. I worried that perhaps the excitement of our shared mission, now complete, was beginning to fade. That the chaplain had been right.
But when she presented me with a gift at the end of our first month together, I wondered if I had been wrong about everything. About her. I felt a mix of admiration and shame, touched by her thoughtfulness and embarrassed by my inability to reciprocate. She watched as I opened the box, almost giddy with anticipation. Inside was a long, silk scarf. My heart sank. “I know you’re afraid to be open with me,” she said. “But I’m not afraid. I thought you understood. I thought you knew all along.”
She took my hands in hers and guided them, tying the scarf into a loose knot, as if to convey the roles we would play from now on—her, pulling the strings. Me, tying the knots. “I was beginning to worry that I had you all wrong,” she said with a laugh. “That you really were innocent. Can you imagine?”
I looked into her eyes and saw another prison. She smiled. and gave me a slow, soft kiss. Her scent filled my nostrils and I hoped I might suffocate in the honey-sweet emanations of her skin. I knew then that there was no use in protesting. There was no way out. I would be who she wanted me to be; though sickened by the prospect, the thought of losing her was too much to bear. I was bound to her, utterly. She slipped her wrists through the loop of the scarf and put her hands together, as if in prayer. “Show me,” she said. “I want to know it all.”
I took a deep breath and pulled the knot tight.