There were eight of us on Death Row when I arrived, and I’d been terrified of meeting these other monsters, these murderous women whose crimes had been bad enough to warrant execution, but they weren’t anything like I’d imagined. It took a long time to even meet everyone, we were so seldom allowed to mingle, except for church or education, or the occasional time more than one of us was allowed in the yard.

There was Paola, from Chile, who’d shot a cop ten years ago, while on the run with her meth-dealing boyfriend. She was only in her forties but worn out, a silent woman with greying hair who rarely spoke.

Julie was the only other white woman. She’d killed her boyfriend with a machete, after years of abuse and coercion. She’d chopped his body up and put it in the drainage system at their caravan park.

Then there was Amber, our undisputed queen, a black woman from New York with flickering, dangerous eyes. I was afraid of Amber. She had killed two of her girlfriends, getting away with it the first time on a self-defence charge, but then later she’d stabbed another woman fifty times in a jealous rage. I always prayed that Amber wouldn’t be in the yard when I went out there, or the small recreation room we were sometimes allowed to be in when they were cleaning our cells or tossing them for drugs. We were probably the safest prison population there was, since we rarely had any visitors who could smuggle us things. Most of our families had long ago given up on us.

Rhonda came after I’d been there nine months. I was keeping a diary, when I could get paper, because I was afraid of losing all track of time – that I’d look up and be sixty and every single day would have been like this. Although maybe in some ways that would have been easier. Every morning I woke up with my sentence heavy on me, like weights on my chest. I would die in here, so what did it matter if it was sooner rather than later? What kind of life would it be in this place? Not worthy of the word, surely. So really, Rhonda came at the exact time I needed her. It’s not an exaggeration to say she saved my life – she literally did.