At six o’clock on a gray spring morning, the locks on death row turned one after another like the teeth of some giant machine.

Men who had spent years pretending not to fear the end stopped pretending.

Boots moved down the corridor.

Keys struck bars.

Orders were given in the flat tone prison staff used when they wanted to sound untouched by the job.

When the guards reached Ramiro Fuentes’ cell, he was already awake, sitting on the narrow bunk with his hands clasped in front of him.

He had not slept.

Nobody expected him to.

In a few hours, if the schedule remained unchanged, he would be led to the chamber at the far end of the building and the state would do what the courts had promised to do five years earlier.

Ramiro stood when the door opened.

His beard had gone heavily gray in prison, and confinement had carved the kind of sharpness into his face that comes from too many years of being watched and not heard.

He did not ask for a priest.

He did not ask for a last meal.

He asked for one thing only.

He said he wanted to see his daughter.

The younger guard looked unsettled by the request.

The older one, a man hardened by routine, muttered that the condemned did not choose the shape of their final hours.

Ramiro repeated himself anyway.

He said her name carefully, as if saying it wrong might somehow injure her.

Salomé.

He had not seen her in person for three years.

The foster system had moved her twice after his mother-in-law died, and each move had made visitation harder, then rarer, then almost impossible.

The request rose through the morning chain of command and landed on the desk of Colonel Arturo Méndez, director of San Gabriel Penitentiary.

Méndez had run prisons for more than three decades.

He had no sentimental illusions about innocence.

He had seen every performance a desperate man could put on.

Some wept because they were afraid.

Some confessed because they were tired.

Some swore innocence until their last breath because denial was the only dignity left to them.

Ramiro had always troubled him for a different reason.

The evidence in the file was brutal in its completeness.

Ramiro’s fingerprints were on the revolver that killed his wife, Lucía.

Her blood was on his shirt.

A neighbor testified that he had seen Ramiro leaving the house minutes after the gunshot.

Prosecutors built the case around a jealous husband who lost his temper after a fight.

It was simple, ugly, and easy for a jury to believe.

Yet Méndez had read the file twice over the years and never quite made peace with it.

There were no prior assaults, no history of threats, no financial gain, no clear motive beyond the sort of vague domestic rage prosecutors loved because juries recognized it.

And Ramiro, through appeals and denials and years of waiting, had never changed his account by a single detail.

He said he came home, found Lucía dying, touched the gun because it was his and because panic makes fools of people, then ran outside after hearing a car pull away.

He said the real killer had already gone.

Maybe he was the best liar Méndez had ever seen.

Or