There was only one person who didn’t visit me, one man from my hometown that I really missed. Darrell never came. Not once. His daughters all did, and they apologized on his behalf, but I just don’t think he was able to face me. I told you, Darrell saw life and people as black and white, evil and good. Somehow this girl who’d been like a daughter to him had proved to be both, and he simply couldn’t deal with it.

Two years after I went inside, Darrell’s wife passed away of cancer. I wrote him a long note of condolence, but he never replied.

And so it went for me.

Twenty years is a long time. You don’t dare think about the end, because thinking about it only makes it seem farther away. Instead, you live each day, expecting nothing. Eventually, you give up obsessing about what you can’t have and resign yourself to the few things you can have. I decided that I still had a life, even behind bars. I read hundreds of books. I taught myself Spanish. I got a four-year degree in English Literature and then a master’s degree. And I wrote you letters, Shelby. Letter after letter, pouring out my thoughts, hopes, and dreams for you. I never mailed them, of course, but I wrote several times a week throughout those twenty years. If you’d like to see them, I still have them.

Tom wrote to me, too. He had to use a kind of code, of course, because there is no privacy for prisoners. He never mentioned your name; he simply told me about his daughter. It was like keeping you in my life. I was so grateful to him for that. He shared all your landmarks, all your special occasions. Every now and then, he dared to send a photo, too, and you grew up just the way I thought you would.

You looked just like me.

*

At the age of forty-seven, I rejoined the world and had to figure out how to live in it again.

The first thing I did was take a bus to Mittel County. You were twenty years old then, already working with Tom in the sheriff’s office. I saw Tom in secret on that trip, and he pleaded with me, begged me, to introduce myself to you, but I didn’t think it was safe. There were too many ways for my presence to open up Pandora’s box, even after twenty years, and I wasn’t going to risk upending the life you had. Or his.