It had never occurred to her that the man raising her daughter was the man who had put her on death row.

And underneath the horror of that realization ran a second horror, quieter and in some ways worse: the thought of all the days.

Five years of days.

Every one of those days, Elena had comforted herself in her cell with the belief that Chloe was safe, was loved, was in the care of family who cherished her.

It had been the load-bearing beam of her sanity, the one thing that made the unbearable bearable.

And now that beam was revealed to have been rotten from the start.