PART 1 — THE WOMAN IN CELL 17

The first thing I noticed about the old woman was that she kept checking the door.

Not the guards.

Not the other prisoners.

The door.

As if she was afraid that someone might come through it and take away the last thing she had left.

She arrived at Westbridge Women’s Correctional Center just after sunrise, carrying a small brown canvas bag against her chest.

She was seventy-six years old.

I learned that later.

At the time, all I knew was that she looked painfully out of place.

Her gray hair was pulled into a loose bun. She wore a faded blue cardigan over a plain dress, and she walked with the careful, uncertain steps of someone whose knees had stopped trusting her.

A guard led her into the common yard.

People stared.

They always did when someone new arrived.

But this time, the staring lasted longer.

“What did she do?” someone whispered.

“Who knows?”

“She looks like somebody’s grandmother.”

I was sitting alone beneath the concrete overhang at the far end of the yard.

Nobody paid much attention to me.

That was exactly how I liked it.

I’d been at Westbridge for eight months, and in those eight months I’d learned one important rule: