The clock on the wall of the Huntsville Unit showed 6:00 a.m., and Daniel Foster had stopped counting the days.
He’d been counting them for five years—five years of concrete walls, five years of staring at the ceiling during sleepless nights, five years of screaming his innocence into an indifferent void. The Texas heat pressed against the windows of his cell like it was trying to crush him from the outside, the same way the justice system had crushed him from within. Today, all that counting would stop.
In exactly twelve hours, Daniel Foster would be executed by lethal injection for a crime he didn’t commit.
He sat on the edge of his prison bunk, wearing the orange jumpsuit that had become his entire identity, and tried to think of his daughter. Emily would be eight years old now. He hadn’t held her since she was three—hadn’t seen her face in person since the trial, when she’d sat in the gallery with her grandmother, too young to understand why her father was sitting at a table with people who wanted him dead.
The guards came to his cell around sunrise, their footsteps echoing down the tier in that way that made other inmates go quiet. Everyone knew what this meant. They’d seen it before.
Daniel stood without resistance. He had stopped fighting long ago.
“Is there anything you need?” one of the guards asked—a younger man named Torres, who seemed genuinely troubled by what was about to happen.
Daniel thought for a moment. He’d been given the standard last meal request form weeks ago, but he’d never filled it out. What was the point of eating when you were about to die?
“I want to see my daughter,” he said, his voice hoarse from disuse. “Just once. Please. Before it’s over. Let me see Emily.”
Torres looked at him with something that might have been sympathy, then exchanged a glance with the older guard beside him—a veteran named Watkins who’d seen enough executions to have developed a kind of professional numbness about the whole thing.
“That’s not really how this works, Foster,” Watkins said, but not unkindly.
“I know,” Daniel replied. “But I’m asking anyway.”
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