It was crazy how much I’d started to look forward to Jeremy’s visits. There was nothing else to structure my life around, just the same featureless cream walls and the hour a day of glimpsing the sky, often grey and flat, not even a cloud to raise some interest. That and the post I was now allowed to receive – full of nutcases, some of whom seemed thrilled by what I’d done, and even a few proposals of marriage. I’ve seen you on TV and you look so sweet, I know you couldn’t do something like that. When you get out you can come and live here, I have a double bed and I’ll take care of you. Then of course there were some who sent death threats, earnestly describing what they would do to me for the crime of murdering a child (rape, mutilation, all of that, these good Christian people).

At first, I had flung them away from me, horrified, and scrubbed my hands clean, weeping. Now I read them with a kind of detached interest, sometimes correcting spelling or grammar mistakes. These people had never met me and yet they wanted to kill me. The state also planned to kill me, but that felt so far away I could hardly worry about it. My main concern was my appeal, what I could do differently this time. No one had been executed in California for years, so it didn’t seem like a big risk. I didn’t know that wheels were in motion and a Republican governor had been elected, a popular actor whose films Jenna had enjoyed, full of muscles and sweat. She liked a real man, did Jenna. She wouldn’t have thought much of Jeremy.

In college I had hardly thought about Jeremy Caldwell, and I struggled to dredge up memories of him. He’d been there when we went to see Austin Powers 2, hadn’t he? He’d bought me a jumbo Coke since I was broke, as always. When there was a prom and we’d all gone as a group, I vaguely remembered him broaching the subject: Of course we could always go together, I mean, if you wanted to, ha ha. I’d brushed off the idea – Ugh, can you imagine, so American – and he’d laughed, but I remembered a look of disappointment on his earnest face.