Part One: Before the Walls
Daniel Marsh had been a carpenter.
Not the kind of carpenter who appears in magazine features about artisanal craftsmanship — not that kind, though he was good enough to have been, if that had been the direction his life took. He was the ordinary kind: a man who built and repaired things for people who needed things built and repaired, who drove a truck with his tools in the back and showed up on time and charged fairly and did work that lasted. He had started as an apprentice at twenty-two and had run his own small operation by twenty-eight, which was not a dramatic success story but was a real one, the kind built from consistency and reputation and the particular satisfaction of someone who is good at a physical skill and knows it.
He had a wife named Claire. He had a son named Noah, who was five years old and who had, from approximately the age of three, decided that his father was the most interesting person in the world, a decision he expressed by following Daniel around whenever possible and asking questions about everything, including the questions that had no good answers, which Daniel always attempted to answer anyway.
He had a house. A rented house, but a house — with a yard that was mostly grass and one stubborn apple tree that produced small, sour apples every autumn that Noah collected with an enthusiasm entirely disproportionate to their eating quality.
He had all of this, and then he made a mistake.
The details of the mistake are not the point of this story, and Daniel would have been the first to say so. He had made a choice in a desperate month — when the work had dried up and the rent was three weeks late and Claire’s mother was ill and the costs of that illness were landing somewhere — and the choice had been wrong and he had known it was wrong when he made it and he had made it anyway, which was the particular kind of guilt that compounds. Not the guilt of someone who didn’t know better. The guilt of someone who did.
He had been sentenced to eighteen months. He had served seven when his birthday arrived.
