The Day I Took the Fall for My Wife

-by Ryan

There’s a lot about my life I can own up to. Mistakes, bad decisions, running with the wrong crowd.

But there’s one thing I’ll never let slide:
Letting my wife carry weight that doesn’t belong to her.

We got arrested together. Yeah, I said it.
Because of me. Because I relapsed. Because I wasn’t thinking straight. Because I had drugs in the car that she didn’t even know were there.

She wasn’t about that life. She’s not an addict.
Before me? Her record was squeaky clean—zero priors, not even a damn traffic ticket on her name. But that didn’t matter to the cops. All they saw was a former correctional officer now married to a man like me.

“Cop gone rogue.”
That’s what they called her.
That’s what they’re still trying to paint her as.

But it’s not true.
She wasn’t part of it. She wasn’t dirty. She wasn’t using.
She was loyal—to a fault, maybe—but never dirty.

And the system don’t care about the truth. They care about a good headline. A better conviction rate.
So yeah—she’s still facing charges. She’s still fighting battles she never should’ve had to fight.
Because of me.

I carry that guilt every single day. It doesn’t leave me. It sits in my chest like a weight I can’t put down.
But here’s the part that matters:
When it came time to speak up, I told them flat out:
It was mine. All of it.

No “we.”
No “us.”
No “both of us.”
Just me.

Because that’s the truth. Because that’s my responsibility. Because when you love someone, you don’t let them drown in your mess.

I’ve made a lot of bad choices in my life, but that day? That wasn’t one of them.
Taking the fall was the right thing to do.
Not because I’m some kind of martyr. Not because I’m trying to play the good guy.
But because she didn’t deserve to be in that position in the first place.

She stood by me. Through it all. Through relapses, through bids, through the worst version of myself.
So standing up for her? That wasn’t even a choice. That was instinct.

People like to talk tough about loyalty, about riding for their people.
But until you’re in that interrogation room, looking at real time, facing real consequences—you don’t know what you’ll do.

I know what I did.
I took it. I owned it. Because she’s my wife. And because it was mine to carry.