Claire sat on the narrow concrete bunk in her cell at the county detention center, staring at the beige walls and trying to remember what her life had been like before everything collapsed; she'd been awaiting sentencing for six weeks now, her bail denied after prosecutors argued she was a flight risk, and each day blurred into the next in an endless monotony of institutional meals and lockdown hours.

Her cellmate, a woman named Rita serving time for check fraud, was at the day room playing ...