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watching me shift and frown from discomfort, leaned over and whispered in my ear how he longed for the ability to make me comfortable. But I needed to nurse or pump, two realities of motherhood not available on that six-hour visit—it’s no surprise that you can’t just pull out your breast and let your baby latch on in a prison visiting room. I mean, people frown on that in liberal areas of New York and San Francisco, but as a new mother I wondered how hard would it have been to have a chair in the ladies’ room where we could sit with our babies and feed them? But these are issues you don’t raise in a prison when your goal is most of all to fly below the radar, thereby avoiding the wrath of guards. Really, you do in prisons what we do in so many other places. Face whatever the situation is, no matter how much you want to shift, no matter how uncomfortable you are.
    â€œI wish I could make this easier for you,” he began softly. “I swear I would do anything. I would do anything,” he continued as he rose slowly from his seat, stood behind me, rubbed my back, and then his fingers through my hair. And I leaned into him, leaned into his hard stomach, and closed my eyes and felt safe and felt a future.
    And then again later, I felt it, the future, as I watched Rashid hold his tiny daughter for the first time and the tears pushed against the corners of his eyes and then they pushed against the corners of my eyes, which was also the moment when I knew,I knew, I was looking at a man for whom—for all his years of penance and prayer, all of his struggle to transform himself, all of his remorse—this was it, the moment when he understood in every part of his DNA, the complete and total preciousness of life.
    And I did too. I understood it even more in the presence of my husband as he held his daughter, our daughter, and we talked about how one day, sooner rather than later, we, Nisa and I, would know father as an action word.
    â€œWhen I come home,” he promised, “you’ll never have to do anything alone again.” I believed him. I can’t imagine believing such a thing now. Now, I can’t imagine relying on anyone for anything, unless perhaps if I’m paying them. But then it was different and everything possible was so close. “It’s right here, baby,” Rashid would say. “The end of all this is right here.” And he was right, of course. The end was right there. It just wasn’t the end we had bargained and planned for. But there was no one to tell us and so no way to know. It’s why we were sure all challenges would be mitigated by the love and the promise of a certain tomorrow.
    On the day Nisa was with her father for the very first time, we looked at all the pictures I’d sneaked in that were taken of Nisa’s birth, and Rashid said, “It almost feels like I was there,” and I said, “I felt like you were there.” And that lie from my mouth sat there between us, a dead thing, a thing that smelled bad, but we did not notice right then. We did not notice it because we did not know it was a lie.
    We only knew our dreams, our push for an ever brighter tomorrow, and as we spoke of our tomorrows, Nisa nuzzled herself into Rashid’s chest and fell asleep right there, not for long, but long enough for him to take in her baby smell, implant the memory of it someplace that could not be searched or discovered or confiscated or destroyed. I could not have been convinced then, in that visiting room, watching Nisa and her father there and then, that I was single, alone.
    Nor did I think of myself as single or as alone later that first afternoon that we three, our family, shared together, when the day slammed shut and the guard was yelling out that visiting hours were over. I thought, It will not always be this way. We are connected, a team, and one day, sooner rather than later, there will be neither guards nor doors to