THE CONFINEMENT ALWAYS bothered me, but it bothered me even more after spring weather arrived. I could tolerate being penned up when there was snow on the ground and cold winds whipping through my too-thin coat, but now I hated every moment I had to spend indoors. Whenever I was allowed outside, I just stood there with my face to the sun, drinking it in through every pore.

Jingjing’s letters didn’t help. Her boyfriend had been as good as his word. He’d given her all her money and a roof over her head and a seat at his table. A place in his bed, too, but she didn’t mind that. Her only complaint was that she couldn’t get a job, at least not a legitimate one, with no papers allowing her to work in this country. But her letters were otherwise sunny. She wrote about walks on the beach, a cookout on George’s back deck, a hedge of blooming yellow bushes around his tiny backyard, and I felt like I was in a straitjacket, my arms and legs bound so tight that I was going to explode.

It was my idea not to push for an early trial date. I’d been so sure that the government would pick up on one of my cues and reopen the investigation. I’d been willing to wait them out. But that was back when my hope sprang eternal, just like those daffodil bulbs. The government hadn’t picked up on anything. I’d miscalculated badly.

The world was waking up outside and I chafed to be out there in it. So I was annoyed when a CO pulled me out of the line for yard time when I was only twenty feet away from the door. She was the same CO who’d taken me to my cell that first night. My warrior face had relaxed since then, but hers hadn’t. “You got a visitor,” she snarled.

There was only one name on my approved-visitors list—Harold Watkins, my PD—but this wasn’t his day to visit Valhalla. If he’d made a special trip to see me, it had to mean something had finally happened. I did an abrupt about-face and led the CO at a brisk pace to the attorney consult room.

“Not there,” she groused. “Here.” She pointed down the corridor to the regular visiting room, where inmates saw family and friends. I’d never been in that room. “Who is it?” I asked.

The CO held out a business card, and I almost recoiled when I saw the white dove. Gingerly I took it. John F. Culligan, Director of Corporate Security. I’d never met the man, but I recognized the name. I went down the hall and peered through the square of glass in the door. There were a dozen people in the room, half of them inmates, the other half visiting women and children. The children had been planted in a corner of the room strewn with brightly colored plastic toys. They played listlessly while the adults whisper-argued with one another.