At the end of the night, the bell clanged in a signal to return to the cells. I snatched up the pen and paper and joined the line shuffling out of the common room. After an evening of hearing their stories, I felt like one of them. I might be the only white face among them, for sure the only one with a graduate degree, but I’d been dragged down by the men in my life, too, just as they had. In a world without David, Roger, and most of all Ingram Barrett, I wouldn’t be here either. I occupied the rest of my march to Pod C visualizing a world without Barrett.

But—exoneration before revenge. I needed to write to David and get to the bottom of exactly what he’d done to land me here.

In the early days we wrote to each other all the time. It was just a silly lovers’ game, since we were living together and saw each other morning and night. But there was something so thrilling about opening my briefcase at the office and finding a handwritten letter from David tucked inside, an ode to our lovemaking the night before or a paean to my body, using terms that would be vulgar in the hands of a lesser writer. But David had the same way with words that he had with my body. I’d read his letter again during lunch and again on my evening commute, and by the time I got home I’d be hot for him all over again.

When did he write the last of those letters? I tried to remember. Probably September 15, 2008. The day the world ended. And when did I write the last of my own letters to him? Probably a year later, when I found one unopened in the trash and realized there was no point in continuing.

I reached my cell and stopped short. Someone else was there, up on the top bunk, tugging a sheet into place. All I could see of her was her upturned backside in the orange scrubs. Then she leapt to the floor and stuck her landing like a gymnast.

“Oh, hi,” she said as she turned. She was tiny, Chinese, I thought, with long black hair held up in a high pony. She’d tied a knot in the hem of her scrubs shirt so that it hugged her rib cage and gave a glimpse of her navel. She could have been thirteen or thirty. She looked like a teenage pop star. “I think you my cellie?” she said.

“I’m Shay.”

“My name Jingjing.”

I took a seat at the desk and picked up the pen. I had fifteen minutes before lights out. Dear David, I wrote. You may have heard—

“I no criminal,” the girl said.

“Me, neither.”—about what happened in the elevator.

“I mean, I not charged with anything. I a material witness.”

“Oh?” That was interesting. I looked up from the page. Here was one more white-woman privilege for me to enjoy, a cellie who was merely a witness. “Witness to what?”