Her whole body went still, and then rigid, and the color drained from her face, and something moved across her features that none of the watching guards could name, a violent collision of emotions with no single name.

And then, impossibly, in that room, on that morning, hours before she was scheduled to die, Elena Cole did something no one had seen her do in five years.

She smiled.

It was not a large smile, and it did not last long, and to anyone who did not know what lay beneath it, it might have looked like nothing at all, a small strange flicker across the face of a condemned woman saying goodbye to her child.

But the guards who saw it would talk about it for years afterward, because there was something in it that did not belong in that room, on that morning, at all.