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harm Genevieve. But, I realized with mounting dread, the message would play nicely to a jury primed on photos of her abused body.
    “This shores up motive even more,” Donnie said gently. “So we need a simple version to sell to the jury. Temporary insanity’s your only way out of this. It’s clean. It’s self-evident. It’s supported by the facts. The brain tumor did it. ”
    I returned his exasperated stare.
    He pressed on. “We lay out the facts, you’ll walk out of here. You can worry about the rest of it from your own bed someday.” He studied my expression, finding something in it he didn’t like. “We play this wrong with what we have stacked against us…”
    The thought of hard time made me feint fetal, my shoulders hunching, my shoes lifting an inch or two from the floor before I stopped my knees’ rise to my chest. In the movies, no matter what, prison is the same. You go in scared, and they call you “fish” and bet cigarettes as to how long it’ll be until you cry. You cell with Bubba, and he breaks you in, and then you become hardened, dead inside, and you barter for candy bars and have to shiv some guy in the shop or his buddies will gang-rape you, and then you get gang-raped anyway just for good measure.
    “You’re a crime writer,” Terry said calmly. “Allow us to help you see how this will read to a jury. Let us take you through it again.”
    And they did, right from the sordid beginning. I sat in my hard little chair, dry-mouthed and stunned by—as they call it on TV—the preponderance of evidence. I’d known the elements, of course, but hearing them edited together into a tale of my murdering Genevieve was chilling. When my nerves settled, I had room for a single lucid thought.
    I’m fucked.
    My righteousness about the plea would have to dissolve under the pressures—and realities—I was facing. I could offer a gut sense of my innocence and little more. Nothing felt more important than staying alive, than staying free. Not even announcing to the world that I was a murderer.
    When they finished, I wanted to give the answer I’d been rehearsing in my head but found myself frozen. I folded my hands on the pitted wood and stared at them, and then I heard myself say, “I won’t plead guilty to a murder I don’t think I committed.”
    The attorneys’ heads swiveled to face each other, their worst fear realized. They appeared as shocked as I was by my decision.
    “With all due respect,” Terry said, “how can you still think you didn’t?”
    “Because I would know in my bones if I had.”
    Out in the hall, the guard cleared his throat loudly. Terry scratched his hair in the back, fingernails giving off a good scraping sound. The sun inched higher in the window, making me squint against the glare.
    Donnie finally punctured the swollen silence with a sigh. He bounced forward, slapped his knees, and rose.
    “So what now?” I asked.
    “We argue each phase like your life depends on it.” He looked up from loading papers into his briefcase. “Because it does.”
     
    I hunched against the cold under the sheet, eyes on the blank wall opposite. A discoloration stained the concrete a few feet up, a splotch and then the trickling fallout. It couldn’t have come from anything benign. I thought of the men who had occupied this cell before me, who’d slept their restless sleep and dreamed their lying dreams.
    Wudn’t me.
    Some motherfucker set me up.
    I’m innocent.
    A guard approached, slipped an envelope through the bars. “You got a letter.”
    I retrieved the envelope from the floor. My name, in a feminine hand. I sat back down and opened it. A piece of paper, torn to shreds. ll your sister.
    Tell me if
    I didn’t ki so sorry for
    I can do. I’m there’s anything your loss.
    The scraps of my note to Adeline slipped from my hands, scattering across the floor. One in particular stared back at me: your loss. I didn’t notice my slow-motion deterioration to the concrete until