My husband had me sentenced to ten years for a two-million-dollar fraud I never committed, and in the courthouse corridor he pulled my grandmother’s ring off my finger and told me to enjoy it. I didn’t argue. I handed a folded piece of paper to the guard.

I have not been able to put that down since. He is right and there is no answer to it and it is the single most uncomfortable fact in this entire account: I did not get out of that van because I was innocent.

I got out of it because the paper had a name on it.

Through the mesh I could see a small crowd on the apron: two of the attorneys from my own trial, a woman I did not recognise in a coat, a federal clerk with a folder, and a corrections captain on a phone.

The order was an emergency one. New material concerning the manipulation of the forensic examination. Suspension of execution pending review. An immediate hearing on the transport authorisation.

It was not freedom. Nobody said the word innocent to me that day or for eight months afterward.

But I did not go inside that building that night.

And standing behind all of them, at the back, not coming forward, was an old man with completely white hair in a dark suit with a cane.