At exactly 2:14 p.m., while I sat in a luxury restaurant with my mistress laughing over a $400 bottle of wine, my pregnant wife sent divorce papers to my office.

The Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, Wisconsin, was surrounded by rolling hills and dense forests. It was a low-security facility, but it was still a prison. The uniform was khaki, the food was industrial, and the routine was absolute.

My days were spent working in the facility’s library, cataloging books, and cleaning the reading tables. The manual labor was a strange comfort. For years, my mind had been a chaotic storm of numbers, deals, and lies. Now, it was forced into a quiet, meditative simplicity.

Every night, I sat on my narrow bunk and wrote letters.

I wrote to Callie. I didn't ask for her forgiveness. I didn't ask her to visit. I didn't complain about the conditions or the food.

Instead, I wrote about my memories. I wrote about the day we met at that small coffee shop in Lincoln Park ten years ago, when I was broke and studying for the bar exam, and she had bought me a muffin because she thought I looked hungry. I wrote about the way she used to sing softly to herself when she was gardening in the backyard.

I also wrote letters to our son, whom she had named Liam. Thomas had sent me a brief text through my lawyer letting me know he was born healthy on April 14th.

I told Liam about the mistakes his father had made. I told him that true strength wasn't found in a luxury penthouse or a seven-figure bank account. I told him that real power was the ability to protect the people who love you, and that the greatest tragedy a man could suffer was the loss of his own integrity.

I never received a reply. Month after month, the letters went out into the world, and only silence returned. But I kept writing anyway. It became my daily liturgy, my way of keeping my soul tethered to the humanity I had so callously discarded.

One afternoon, fourteen months into my sentence, the library supervisor tapped me on the shoulder. "Reed. You have a visitor. Legal lounge."

I frowned. Robert Vance usually called ahead before visiting. I washed my hands, smoothed down my khaki shirt, and walked down the long, sanitized corridor to the visitation room.