When I first met Mike, he said: “These young guys — they just got locked up and they’ve got five years to do and they hate it. I get that. When you’re 20, five years is a long time, so they act out. I used to be like that. But now I’m two-thirds done, so every day is taking me closer to the door. When I think like that, I can get up in the morning and smile.”

A month later, my supervisor told me Mike had been locked up for more than 16 years and had at least 8 more to go. Arrested when he was a teenager, he wasn’t going to be released until he was in his mid-40s. He had raped the sheriff’s daughter in his hometown. It didn’t matter how fat his folder of supportive letters got.

“I used to be angry,” Mike told me. “I’d pick fights over nothing. I was mad to be in prison and I wanted everyone else to be mad, too. But then I realized: Man, this is my life. Do I want to be that guy? Always mad? I’m not going to get married or have a family. Not today. Maybe never. I’m going to be here. I’m a prisoner. There are some things I’m never going to do. And I can spend my life being mad about that, or I can try something else.”

I asked him what he had decided.

“I decided to be the best prisoner I could be,” he said.

This all relates to the clock on the wall because I fell in love again, and this became my new life. She was from New Hampshire and had never been to France. She left me for two years to write a memoir about her mother, but then she came back. She wrote me letters and I felt I knew her entire apartment because I studied the tiny photos she sent me of her sitting at her desk or standing by her curtains.