He watched me go, his eyes hungry, despite my orange suit and ratty hair and dead skin. This man loved me; he’d do anything to help me. As I walked back into the prison, I had the thought – You don’t love him back, Casey, you never could. And then another – But he’s the only one who’s going to help you now. You learn a lot about yourself in a no-hope situation. Namely, the lengths you will go to in order to survive.

The guard took off my cuffs, rough as usual.

‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘That man there, he’s a journalist, and he said he wrote me lots of letters. But I never get any post.’

‘Post?’ she mimicked. ‘What’s post?’

‘Mail, then. Is there any chance the letters went missing?’

‘How the hell’d I know?’

‘Because I think it’s against the law to intercept mail. Even in prison. I mean, I could always check in the law library.’

She said nothing, slamming the door again. But the next day a pile of envelopes appeared on my bunk, addressed in Jeremy’s spidery mad-man writing. And I feasted on the letters inside, like a starving woman. Not the words, which were banal and mostly descriptions of the injustices in my case, memories I didn’t share of times we’d spent together back in England, and stories from his Dungeons & Dragons group. Not the words, but the sense that someone cared whether I lived or died, whether I ever got out of this scorpion hole in the desert or whether I curled up and shrivelled to a husk.

Rachel

Rachel

It was raining again as I trekked back to my rented flat. Coldwater was a small place, so it was just a few streets away from Alex’s, but it might as well have been thousands of miles, I felt so far from him. I was exhausted to the soles of my feet – a long and ultimately fruitless day of investigating. Jeremy had lied about going home. Alex had possibly lied to me about being at Anna’s house that night – assuming that was what Sam meant. Poor kid. How would he ever be able to make sense of this?