Suicide is ever present in prisons, especially when a prisoner has been told they will die here. It’s thought that it deprives the state of their vengeance, if someone takes their own life. That your life is no longer yours, even to end. You have to sit and wait in a claustrophobic box, smelling your own sweat for decades, and you can’t know what year or month or second they will choose to end that life for you, as is their right. It’s appalling, when you think about it, which I had only vaguely before, when that film Dead Man Walking came out. That was me. Dead Woman Walking. I wished I’d paid attention in school, to know these things.

The eight of us on Death Row had become used to each other, like cats forced to share a small flat. Most of us were flattened down by our misery, and in Paola’s case half dead from enforced drugs detox, and barely had the energy to start a fight. Rhonda was different – she had been through all of this, and come out the other side, the place where you decide you aren’t going to die after all, not until they drag you into that chamber kicking and screaming.

She had previously been held in another prison while her case shuttled back and forward between appeals courts, but a new right-wing judge had decided she deserved the death penalty after all, and she was moved here. It made little difference, since she would die in prison either way. I first saw her while in the exercise yard, staring up at my patch of sky, trying to fix it in my memories, the white lid of the Californian desert, the hot air irritating my eyes and nose. While in the yard, you could see out through the fence to the main gate of the prison, spot any new people arriving. Not many people arrived at Death Row, so when I heard a truck and voices, I sauntered over there, trying to look nonchalant. My guard was playing a game on his phone, which they weren’t supposed to have on duty but nearly all did.

A woman, tall and black, was being led into the prison in cuffs, the same orange jumpsuit we all wore. Her hair was in long braids and I wondered how she’d managed that, since we weren’t allowed to have ours done in here. My own hair was ratty and dull. For a second her eyes caught mine and I jumped back, as if burned. This woman was still alive inside. She had not given up, though she’d been sentenced to death. She was still here, not roaming through a fantasy world or numbed by drugs either legal or illegal, like the rest of us. My heart was hammering.