‘That’s OK.’ I sat down. I still had no idea who he was. He was familiar but somehow I couldn’t quite place him. ‘I’m sorry, you are . . . ?’

His face fell. ‘It’s Jeremy! From college? Jeremy Caldwell?’

Of course, Jeremy who hung around my crew, who ran the college newspaper and had done a feature on me heading off to America, as if a job as a nanny was something to be proud of. Always on the periphery of my vision, though I’d known him since I was eleven.

‘God! I’m sorry. I just – I didn’t expect to see you.’ It was surreal, in fact, as if someone from another life had walked into a dream – or a nightmare. ‘What are you doing here?’ I was suddenly very aware of how awful I looked, seeing someone from my old world.

‘I told them I was a journalist to get in,’ he said, looking around him furtively. ‘Well, I am a journalist. Got a trainee job on the local paper, so I had my NUJ card and all.’

‘You were in California?’ I couldn’t understand what had brought him here.

‘No, no, I’ve come to see you. I’ve been following your case right from the start. I wrote to you.’

I shook my head dully. Why was he here? I had left that student life behind, the one where I was a popular pretty girl going places. It was the only way to survive what I’d become.

‘I don’t get letters,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to but – there’s some court case going on.’

There was a wrangling in process with the governor’s office over the rights of Death Row prisoners – that is, whether we had any or not. The guards were not above confiscating letters and packages, out of greed or just spite.

‘Oh,’ said Jeremy. ‘Well, as soon as I heard you’d been found guilty, I set up a website to prove your innocence. It has a lot of traffic – people want to hear the other side of your story.’

Again, it took a few moments, the way light has to fight its way down to the darkness at the bottom of the ocean.

‘You mean – you think I didn’t do it?’

I didn’t know if I’d ever met anyone who thought that. My lawyers clearly didn’t, and even Jenna rarely answered the phone to me now. My own mother had abandoned me here in this place.

‘Of course I do.’

He laid his hand on the table, and for a second, before the guard saw, he touched mine with his little finger. It was clammy, but all the same it was pretty much the first kind touch I’d had in two years. I nearly jumped out of my skin. He snatched his hand away, staring at me hard instead, as if touching me with his gaze.