The prison clock showed six in the morning when the guards unlocked the cell of Mateo. For five years he had waited for this moment, insisting on his innocence to walls that never answered him. Now, with only hours left before his sentence would be carried out, he made one final request.
“I want to see my daughter,” he said, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. “That’s all I ask. Let me see Isabella before it ends.”
One guard looked at him with sympathy. The older one scoffed, muttering that condemned prisoners deserved nothing. Still, Mateo refused to give up. Isabella was eight years old now. He had not seen her in three years. Before everything ended, he wanted to look at her just once.
Eventually the request reached the prison director, Colonel Alvarez, a sixty-year-old man who had watched hundreds of inmates walk the final corridor. Yet Mateo’s case had always troubled him. The evidence had seemed convincing—fingerprints on the weapon, blood on his clothes, and a witness who said he saw Mateo leaving the house that night. But Mateo’s eyes had never looked like the eyes of a guilty man. After thirty years in corrections, Alvarez trusted that instinct.
“Bring the girl,” he ordered.