The other guard tossed a heel of moldy bread on the floor. “If you’re standing when we open the door in the morning, you’ll be let out in the yard for a few minutes,” he told her as they left. “If you’re lyin’ down, you’ll be left in here all day.” They locked her inside with a skeleton key.

The cell was as cold and deathly quiet as a tomb. Shivering in her shawl against the stone wall in the darkness, Hazel pulled the greasy blanket around her shoulders. She heard the thwack of hammers and the echoey voices of male convicts in the next yard, working on the prison expansion. Smelled the residue of waste in the bucket in the corner, the mold creeping up the walls, her own monthly blood. She rubbed the oval disk around her neck, tracing the numbers with her finger: 1–7–1.

She thought of Ruby in the dormitory at the orphanage, waiting in vain for her to arrive. She thought of Mathinna, isolated in some dismal room. Evangeline as she fell to her death—a glimpse of gown, arms flailing in the air.

She’d been no good to any of them.

Hazel banged her head against the wall. She wailed and sobbed until a guard rapped on the door of her cell, telling her to quiet down or he’d make her quiet down.

In the morning, frost dusted her blanket. When she heard the clang of a bell and the clacking of locks being undone, she struggled to stand.

The cobblestones in the courtyard were treacherous with ice. Her vision was blurry, her limbs stiff and achy, her feet unsteady as she plodded back and forth.

For the rest of the day she sat in the darkness of her cell picking oakum. As her cold fingers worried the rope, she tried to view the task as a puzzle rather than a punishment, a way to endure the minutes. This goes here, that goes there. A way to escape the torture of her thoughts. But she could not escape them. Could not stop thinking of Ruby, alone in her bed, wondering why her mother hadn’t come. Hazel seethed like a kettle on a low flame, picking at the oakum, picking at the question of who betrayed her. Which of her fellow inmates was so jealous, so vindictive, that she would ruin the life of a child?

Her hands cracked and bled. Salt seeped into the cuts; they felt as if they were on fire. She tried to manage the pain, as she’d taught women in labor to do: to think of it as a part of her, as much a part of her as her limbs. Without the pain, she could not complete the task. She needed to listen to it, breathe through it. Be alert to its ebbs and flows. Dwell inside it.

At the end of the day, a guard arrived to weigh her bucket. “Five pounds,” he said. “Just.”

Sometimes she made a sound just to hear a sound. Smacked the wall. Flicked her finger through the water bucket. Hummed to herself. Maybe she could drown out the noises in her head, the fear and loneliness and self-recrimination.