Requests like Elena’s were rarely approved.

Bringing a young child into a maximum-security unit to say goodbye to a parent hours before an execution was the kind of thing that generated paperwork and objections and quiet institutional reluctance at every level, and any warden would have been within his rights, and arguably his duty, to deny it.

Mitchell read the request through twice.

He thought about the little girl he had never met, who had been three years old when her mother was taken away in chains and was eight now, who had grown up in the long shadow of a crime her mother swore she had not committed.

He thought about the steadiness in Elena’s eyes that he had never been able to explain away.