In 2017, Beverly Morello was traveling home from seeing her daughter when she got a voicemail from the Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center in Greenfield, where she worked as a bookkeeper.

The message was simple, asking Morello to give her a call back as soon as possible.

Morello said she knew, in that instant, that it was over. She had been caught.

“I knew. I was almost expecting it,” Morello said.

In her role as bookkeeper for the conference center, Morello had been stealing from the organization, and not in small amounts – $700,000 over the course of seven years. She described the moment in her new memoir, “From Darkness to the Light,” written under the pen name Helen Haskell, based on the diaries she wrote during her nearly year-long stay in prison and a halfway house as she served her sentence.

Morello said one of the reasons she wanted to write the book was to show the impact that time had on her, and how it transformed her. She said she was forced to face the consequences for her actions and not just the consequences on her.

“The impact of my actions was very hard on my family and it took forgiveness and understanding to work through it all.  But I can only imagine the impact my actions had on my work colleagues.  As part of my sentence I was not allowed to contact anyone associated with the center, so I was not able to apologize directly to any of them,” Morello said. “These were such good people, and hopefully someday I can express how deeply sorry I am for what must have been a devastating reality they all had to sort out. And hopefully one day they too will forgive me.”

Morello said, even now, she struggles to put into words why she did what she did. She said she was raised in a Christian home, went to a Christian school and carried that faith into her adult life.

“I don’t think being raised a Christian hides you from making mistakes, even big mistakes,” Morello said. “We all go astray in some aspects, and mine happened to be a big one. I think that I let the stress and pressure of life make me decide I needed to put matters into my own hands, without trusting God. I let my mind get so displaced, that the more I did the crime, the better I felt. It’s very scary now, looking back – it was a scary place to be. God was not in my head or in my heart, even though on the outside, that’s what it appeared.”

Morello said her reinvestment in her faith was one of the big things her time in prison allowed her to focus on. A friend sent her a study Bible, and she said she worked on her faith every day in prison.

“When you’re sitting in prison, you have nothing better to do than read, pray and work on yourself,” Morello said.

She said prison was an immediate culture shock for her. She even had to get used to the cursing, which she said was frequent and uncomfortable for her, but also having to learn to navigate the many explicit and unspoken rules.

“I felt like I was put in a foreign country,” Morello said. “There were a lot of times I would just sit, and I couldn’t believe what was happening. I’d ask myself, ‘Is this real life?’”

She said in part, that’s why she started keeping a diary, which started out as a devotional, then an attempt at a daily letter home, and eventually just became a way for her to record her thoughts.

Throughout her book, her faith is a large aspect of her experience. She said she saw God’s hand in many of the things that happened, including her sentencing, which she said was the best outcome she could have expected, to the timing of the trial, which allowed her to attend her mother’s funeral. She said she spent a lot of time working on her feelings of shame and guilt, and pulling herself up from some very low points, mentally and emotionally.

Morello said that work she did on herself and some of the people she met during the experience were the two aspects she most considers a blessing of her time in prison. She said there were moments that were very hard – small things that blew up into huge conflicts, bullying from other inmates or corrections officers.

“That was a mental battle every day, and it was exhausting,” Morello said. “Daily life was just sometimes ridiculous. You could get into a fight over how someone was using a broom.”

But she said, in other ways, it was eye-opening to get to know some of the other women she served time with – some of whom she is still in contact with.

“It really changed my whole view of not only these women, but people in general, and the struggles they go through,” Morello said. “I used to cry at night because I felt so touched by their struggles.”

She said before this experience, she made judgments about some people, such as those with addictions, but getting to know people and hearing their stories has made her more open-minded in general.

Morello said she started sharing some of her writings in a blog after being released, and was encouraged by friends to organize it into a book.

“The main reason I decided to put out the book was to show people the journey – from darkness to light, as the title says,” Morello said. “I was about as low as you can get to, and I came through that. I just want people to know that you can still get to the end, and be better. And be OK.”

Copies of “From Darkness to the Light,” are available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon or the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, or directly through the publisher at balboapress.com/en/bookstore.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.