Elena closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of her daughter’s hair, and tried, with everything she had, to make that one minute last the rest of her life, however short the rest of her life was now scheduled to be.

Then Chloe leaned in, and turned her face toward her mother’s ear, and whispered something.

It was so quiet that no one else in the room could hear a single word of it, a breath of sound and nothing more, a secret passed from a child’s lips into her mother’s ear.

The guards exchanged glances, mildly curious, expecting nothing, a child’s private goodbye.

But the effect on Elena was not the effect of a goodbye.