Beth had been a little concerned when Jack Tiedemann applied for a job, and that concern only got worse with time. The money was good—Jack was twenty-eight and making more than her daddy had ever made working at the department store. But she felt the job was costing them something, just as it had cost the town. Weldonville didn’t really have an identity now that was separate. When people in surrounding cities and towns mentioned Weldonville, they didn’t mean the nice little Colorado town with the round park in the center and the old trees shading the grid of residential streets. They meant Weldonville Federal Penitentiary; just like when people said “Leavenworth,” they didn’t mean a city in Kansas.

Since the subject had become important to her, she had noticed that the government seemed to prefer to build prisons in places like this, where the ground was flat and covered with fields of grain or weeds for miles in every direction. That was so if a prisoner ran away, he would have no place to hide.

She loved Jack so much it hurt, and if she closed her eyes and pictured him in his guard uniform going inside the high-walled complex, she could make herself cry, even though she wasn’t a crier.

The Bureau of Prisons men had said this would be a modern, limited-security facility for white-collar and nonviolent offenders. But a few years after the complex was finished and Jack was working there, something had changed. Or maybe just their story had changed. The supervisors said there were many more violent criminals and fewer tax evaders and insider traders and computer hackers than they had planned for. Some of the other prisons in the system were old and out-of-date, not suited to house more difficult prisoners. Because Weldonville was new and had been built to a higher standard, it was one of the only places they had that would work.

Jack had found himself on details in the general prison population with a couple of other guards, all of them carrying only extendable batons and pepper spray because the thing prisons feared most was an inmate getting his hands on a guard’s gun.

There were snipers in the guard towers and on the catwalks with M4 rifles, partly to protect those unarmed guards. Sometimes the man on the catwalk who had to be prepared to kill prisoners was Jack.

She put the apple and the cupcake in Jack’s lunch box and was nearly ready to shut it. She looked up at the window again and saw that the pinks, oranges, and reds on the white wisps of cloud were losing their fire, and the night blues and blacks were waiting behind them. The night shift was coming, and she had only a few minutes.