He didn’t respond, climbing out of the truck and slamming the door behind him. Kristy watched Ryan hurry down the block, waiting until he turned around the corner. God, she missed the days when she would drop him off and he would throw his arms around her and say, Mama, I love you more than the moon and the stars and all the planets in the universe. But that didn’t happen now. Fourteen-year-olds weren’t exactly open vessels of emotion.

Kristy navigated the pickup down the long stretch of highway, the miles clicking by, a pop-country tune playing on the radio. She switched it off, not in the mood for overproduced melodies. She made a left turn, gripping the steering wheel, and headed toward the entrance of the prison where her day would begin. Set on 472 acres and surrounded by forests and fields, the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, was an expansive complex connected by walkways and encircled by two perimeter fences of razor wire with guard towers. The buildings that housed Texas’s male death row inmates were set apart from the others: three concrete rectangles with white roofs, each with a circular recreation area at the center. In total, the prison housed 2,936 inmates, 279 of them on death row.

Kristy made this drive once a week, arriving every Wednesday morning like clockwork, but she never acclimated to the work. She never grew accustomed to the stern guards with their rifles pointed in the tower above her, or the desperate inmates she met pleading their innocence and begging for her help, or the ones admitting their guilt without an ounce of remorse.

This wasn’t Kristy’s dream job. Not by a long shot. Knocked up at sixteen, Kristy vowed that even though she would be a teenage mother, she wouldn’t be a statistic. She would do something with her life. She earned her GED and then, with Pops’s encouragement, she took night classes at Sam Houston State. Kristy studied communications and psychology, working part-time in various administrative capacities at the prison to help pay the bills. Pops had been a prison guard and so had his father beore him. Despite Kristy’s insistence that she could find a job on her own, Pops kept harassing the head of the public information office and before Kristy even graduated from college, she’d landed a job as an assistant to one of the public information officers, or PIOs, as they were known.

Part of Kristy had hated the idea of being surrounded by criminals—men and women who had done terrible things—but she’d told herself it was temporary. She’d planned on going to graduate school, studying psychology, and becoming a social worker. She figured her experience in the prison system would be an added bonus on her résumé. Working with and getting to know the inmates strengthened that resolve, made her want to help those in need before they ended up behind bars.