Margaret Ellis stepped through the doors of the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center for Women in Nashville, Tennessee, on a Friday morning in March, carrying everything she owned in a clear plastic bag.
Forty-seven dollars. A faded photograph. A small wooden cross she had worn since she was sixteen years old.
Twenty years behind bars, reduced to something that barely weighed anything at all.
She was fifty-two when she went in. Still had color in her hair. Could carry groceries without getting winded. Old enough to know better — but she didn’t. She didn’t know anything at all, not then.
Now she was seventy-two. Gray-haired and stooped, with arthritis in both knees and a heart that sometimes skipped beats when she climbed stairs too fast. Twenty years had taken her health, her youth, and her husband’s final years. Robert had died in 2011 — a heart attack, sudden and merciless — and Margaret hadn’t been there. Hadn’t been allowed to attend the funeral. Her sister Diane was supposed to handle everything.
She was supposed to handle all of it.
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