“My brother blamed himself for what had happened. He had been clean for nearly three years. He was holding the first steady job of his life. After I was convicted, he just disappeared.

“I was carrying the pain of Alyssa’s loss, the guilt and the loneliness, and then prison. I realized my first day in prison that I wasn’t going to make it. That’s when I did this.” He slightly rotated his wrist to expose the scar. Eliana began to tear up. “A guard discovered me before I bled to death. Ironically, my attempted suicide is what saved my life.

“The prison counselor recommended that, for my own safety, I be put in prison industries. I was a big shot in the Minnesota advertising scene. I had won a lot of awards, both regional and national. The man in charge of prison industries knew of my work. I started an advertising agency in the prison. We started making money. The system takes care of itself. I was put in honor block, given my own cell and special privileges.

“Some men turn to God in prison. I suppose I did too, but through a form I could understand—art. It was the same thing that got me through my parents’ death. I began filling my cell with pictures. Most of the inmates had pictures of women ripped from porn magazines. My nudes were seven-hundred-year-old statues and plump women in oil paintings.”

“And the Uffizi?”

“It started with a wrinkled National Geographic article showing the works of Botticelli. I would stare at his pictures and the prison walls just melted away. You can’t be confined where there’s art. It became my hobby. I started collecting pictures of the Uffizi’s masterpieces and filled my cell with them, until I had constructed the entire Uffizi in my cell.

“Up to that point I had just been waiting for the right time to take my life. I changed. I decided that I would live and that they would steal as few years from my life as possible. I started lifting weights, taking vitamins, anything that would prolong my life. And I promised myself that I would leave America and move to Italy the day I was released.”

“So you learned Italian.”

Ross smiled. “All it takes to learn a language is time. I had plenty of that. Fifteen to life.” Ross exhaled. “Then one fine day, three and a half years after I was incarcerated, a guard knocks on my cell. ‘Hey, Story, your attorney’s here to see you.’ My attorney’s sitting behind the glass. I haven’t heard from him in three years. I spent more than a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and not even a Christmas card.

“He tells me that the day before the police had picked up a guy in lower St. Paul, some petty drug dealer. It was his third offense and he was scared and begging for leniency. He told the police that one of his users had killed a woman in Como Park that some businessman had taken the fall for. He said he could prove it because the guy carries the woman’s driver’s license around like a souvenir and had given him her engagement ring to pay off a debt. The dealer liked it, and his girlfriend was still wearing it.