'Day One | 3:47 PM | February 11th, 2025'
'Tuesday. Which is already a terrible day to have your life fall apart.'
Fuck.
No, seriously. Fuck.
I need everyone who reads this to understand that twenty minutes ago, I was sitting in my living room, in my favourite chair, with a cannolo I had flown in from a bakery in Palermo, Sicily. I waited forty-eight hours for that cannolo. Forty. Eight. Hours.
It hadn't even touched my lips.
And now I'm in the back of a police car with my wrists in handcuffs and the officer in the front seat has the audacity to be humming. Humming. Like this is a casual Tuesday for him.
It is a casual Tuesday for him.
It is the worst Tuesday of my life.
Let me back up.
---
My name is Ruaan Calder. Twenty-six years old. I come from money — the kind of money that means problems disappear quietly and nobody asks questions. I have good hair, excellent taste, and until today, a perfect record.
Well.
Technically perfect.
See, two years ago, I made a decision. I won't call it a mistake because mistakes are accidents and I knew exactly what I was doing. I just thought I was smarter than the consequences.
Here's what happened.
I was driving home from a party — don't ask which party, it doesn't matter — and I clipped another car at an intersection. The other driver was a girl named Mara. Twenty-two. Sweet face. Wrong place, wrong time.
She wasn't seriously hurt. A fractured wrist, some bruising. But the way the law works, someone had to be responsible. And responsible meant lawyers, and lawyers meant my father finding out, and my father finding out meant—
You know what, it doesn't matter what it meant.
The point is, Mara took the blame. I made sure of it. Money moved. Documents shifted. Witnesses forgot what they saw. She went to prison for two years and I went home, poured myself a drink, and got engaged to Dominic Frey three months later.
Life moved on.
I moved on.
Mara got out six months ago. I didn't think about it. Why would I?
Turns out, someone else did.
Someone dug everything up. Every document I buried, every witness I paid off, every lie carefully stacked on top of the last. All of it, unravelled. And this morning, while I was still in my dressing gown, the police knocked on my door with a warrant and the kind of expressions that meant no amount of money was fixing this one.
I tried anyway.
They were not interested.
---
So here I am.
Back of a police car. No cannolo. Wrists hurting because apparently these officers don't know how to size handcuffs properly. I asked the humming one to loosen them and he pretended not to hear me.
I have been stripped of my dignity, my dessert, and apparently my freedom.
Dominic hasn't called.
Dominic hasn't called.
I've been arrested for approximately forty minutes and my fiancé has not called. What does that tell you? It tells me something. I'm not ready to write it down yet because if I write it down then it becomes real and I have already had enough real for one Tuesday.
---
The facility they're taking me to is called Blackmere Correctional.
I googled it while my lawyer was yelling at me over the phone.
It has a three-star rating on— actually, never mind. The point is it looks exactly as terrible as it sounds. Grey walls. Grey everything. Two years of grey.
Two years.
Twenty-four months.
My lawyer says if I behave, maybe less. I told him I always behave. He made a sound I didn't appreciate.
---
Fine.
Fine.
I, Ruaan Calder, have been thrown into a men's correctional facility for two years because apparently karma is real and has excellent timing.
But let me be very clear about something.
I am not a weakling. I am not soft. I did not survive twenty-six years in the Calder family, with a father like mine, by breaking easily.
This is a prison for men.
I might as well rule it.
Day one of seven hundred and thirty. Let's go.
---
— R.C