I sat in that chair at fifty-two years old and watched David put something permanent on my skin that was supposed to mean everything. It meant a lot. It didn’t mean enough.

William Robinson was a Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy, twenty-six years old, and my best friend. He’s been dead for thirty years and I still haven’t figured out what to do with that.

I sat in that execution chamber and watched the man who killed my brother die, and I still don’t have a word for what I felt. Closure wasn’t it.