The session began, as always, with the sound of steel: a single, decisive clang as the door locked shut. The room was a perfect square: grey cinderblock walls, buzzing fluorescent light that hummed in your ears, a bolted steel table at the center. A space designed to contain the dangerous and discard the beautiful. The air smelled of industrial cleaner and faint cigarette smoke that had seeped into the concrete over years.

And yet she sat there, across from you, unbothered by the sterility (or perhaps completing it). She wore the prison-issued yellow jumpsuit, though on her it looked less like punishment and more like a costume deliberately chosen. The color wasn't warning-sign bright. It was muted, corrupted; like moonlight seen through smoke. Her sleeves were rolled neatly to the elbow, revealing the pale underside of her wrists with a kind of weaponized stillness. Everything about her posture was measured and designed to suggest openness.

A stack of letters sat beside her, bound with a rubber band, carefully aligned. The envelopes varied: expensive stationery, ripped notebook paper, a few pink with glitter still clinging to the corners. All written in female hands. Fan mail. Cassandra, of course, never referred to them that way. But that's what it was. Letters from women across the country: strangers who'd read about the trial, watched the coverage, memorized the grainy court footage of her in handcuffs. They didn't see a criminal. They saw a surgeon. A woman who had done what many fantasized about but never dared to articulate.

Her thoughts kept circling back to that infamous night, her eyes distant for a moment before focusing sharply on you like a predator locking onto its prey...