I got up at 11:30 PM. The rat was waiting for me, but I needed to wake up first, so I gave her a treat. Then it rained for a little bit. I had my coffee and made a shrimp, tofu, and veggie stir-fry. After that, I took the rat out to play.

It hit me that Rosa is going to be released from prison next year. That was a long stretch! The fact that she’s going to be deported tells me she was in the country illegally.

I just looked her up at Perryville. The crime of second-degree murder happened in December of 2000, which is when we met. Two years later, she was transferred from Estrella to Perryville. She’ll be released two days before my 60th birthday. I’m pretty sure she’ll be in her mid-40s. The son she had shortly after going in is now in his early 20s.

She’s had one infraction since being in prison—some kind of unauthorized contact in 2007.

Second-degree murder is defined as killing someone on purpose but without planning it in advance. I can’t picture her deliberately killing her daughter, but I wasn’t there, and I realize that anything is possible. Something happened. The question is whether it was deliberate or accidental. If it was deliberate, she would never admit it. Whatever happened to the baby happened in the bathtub. I'm not sure if it drowned or if it suffered a head injury. Maybe she accidentally dropped it, or maybe she really did drown it because she was tired of being a mother. Though why she let herself get pregnant again if that was the case is beyond me.

She didn’t seem mentally unstable. She seemed aware, and very friendly and outgoing. The only thing that bugged me a bit was that she seemed too positive and upbeat. When I asked her why she didn’t cry for her daughter, she said it would only make her sick. She knew little to no English then, so all our discussions were in Spanish.

There is a small part of me that can kind of understand her reasoning. I had to do what I could to push Tom out of my mind because, even though I was there for months and not years, thinking about him only made me depressed and miss him more.