Originally posted on French Coalition Against the Death Penalty’s Facebook page. Reposted here with permission. Visit FCADP website for more about their France-based work to end the death penalty in the U.S.

This piece was written for every woman whose soul has carried the weight of pain but today, it roars for one of our own. We are in the same boat, bonded by more than friendship: by love, by fire, by fierce sisterhood.** And today, Vicky needs us not just as friends, but as warriors. As shields. As hearts that do not back down. We stand for her, we burn for her, we fight with her.

She is not alone. She never will be. Our love is her armor. Our prayers, her strength. Our presence, her battlefield.

For Vicky. With every heartbeat. With every flame. With everything we are.

Forever. Together. Always.

“The Needle Is Sharp. But My Words Cut Deeper.”

To my love, the man they gave thirty days to leave me.

They told me yesterday, without warning, without mercy. Just a letter shared online, cold and routine, like they’d sent it to a thousand others before me. They signed it. Your death warrant. Thirty days. That’s what they’ve decided is enough. As if thirty days could undo everything we built together between cinderblock walls and trembling hands on Sunday mornings. As if love ever answered to a calendar.

They don’t know us. They don’t know how you looked at me that first day, like you were scared to believe I was real. They didn’t see the way your voice softened when you said my name, as if it might shatter in your mouth. They weren’t there, Sunday after Sunday, when we built something real with nothing but time, eyes, and touch. They didn’t watch you hold me like I was the only thing still alive in your world. They don’t know what it means to fall in love in a place meant to starve it. But I do. And you do.

You gave me more with one look than others give in a lifetime. You gave me a place to land when I didn’t think I had one. You gave me your truth, your fear, your guilt, and your hope. And now, because a stranger in a suit scribbled their name at the bottom of a form, they think they can take you away. Not just you. Us.

They’re not just killing a man. They’re killing every kiss I’ll never have, every birthday we’ll never celebrate, every quiet moment where your hand would have reached for mine. They’re killing what we were becoming.

Because what we had wasn’t a visit. It was life. A soft, trembling, holy life. You changed, not because they told you to, but because you wanted to. You became more. You opened your heart to love in the one place where you had every reason not to. You gave me you. And they want to end that. Not because they have to. Because they can.

They don’t see your face when you smile. They don’t know the way your voice shakes when you talk about the things you regret. They never heard the way you say “I still can’t believe you love me, beats me” like it breaks you and heals you all at once. They didn’t sit where I sat. They didn’t see you become the kind of man the world begs for and then throws away.

So yes, they signed a piece of paper. But what they really signed was the end of our future. Of your growth. Of our hope.

They call it justice. But how can justice look like love dying in slow motion?

To those who signed: this letter is for you too. I want you to know I believe in redemption. Not because it’s easy, but because I watched it grow. Every week. In him. In us. And if you looked him in the eyes the way I did, if you heard the words he never said to anyone else, you’d know what I know. That he is not a monster. He is not the worst thing he’s done. He is a man. A man who loves. A man who changed.

You think this is just a job. That your pen doesn’t bleed. But it does.

I hope this follows you home. I hope it sits with you in the dark, when everything is quiet. When your children are safe and warm and alive. I hope you think of the man you’re trying to erase, and the woman you’re forcing to watch. Because thirty days is not just time. It’s a funeral in slow motion. And I’m the one burying him while he still breathes.

And when it’s done when his body has been carried away and the headlines have quieted down, where will you be when I’m still here, sobbing in the middle of the night, clutching the space he left behind? Where will your sense of justice be when I can’t eat, when I can’t sleep, when depression swallows every trace of who I used to be? What will you say when I’m just a shadow moving through the world, half-alive, if I survive at all? Because you are not just taking his life. You are destroying mine too. And I want you to know that. I want you to carry it.

This letter will outlive the needle. But you still have time to outlive your indifference.

Don’t let this be just another death. Don’t let this be who we are.

Not if you still believe in love. Not if you still believe in anything.

This letter is for us. The women who have lost our husbands to death by law. For the ones who counted the last thirty days with hands that shook too hard to hold a coffee cup. For those of us who walked away from a last embrace knowing the state had already dug the grave. For those who are still counting, still hoping, still waking up in the middle of the night with his name in our mouths.

We are not just names in a logbook. We are the last hands that held them warm. The last voice they heard. The ones who stayed when the world left. We carry love through fire, and memory through ash.

This letter is for every governor who sleeps peacefully while signing lives away. For every lawmaker who believes in justice only when it’s neat and distant. We still believe in redemption. Not as an idea but as a truth we held. As a truth we loved.

And if this letter doesn’t move you, then it is not us who are lost. It’s you.

But if something in you stirs, a crack, a breath, a shadow of feeling, then let that be what stops the next clock.

This letter is not just ours. It is the cry of every woman who has ever held a hand she wasn’t allowed to keep, of every woman who watched the clock devour the man she loves. It carries the breath of every wife who left a prison visit still feeling the warmth of his hug on her skin, only to wake up alone the next day to a system that never cared. It belongs to every man who clawed his way back from his darkest hour, only to find the door still closed. It belongs to the future; they keep trying to bury the one built on mercy, not vengeance. On truth, not silence. On love, not execution. This letter doesn’t just belong to us. It belongs to the fight for what’s still human in all of us. And it belongs to the world we refuse to stop believing in no matter how many times they try to kill it.

With deep Love…

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** For context on the “sisterhood” referenced here: There are over 2000 men on Death Row in the U.S., and fewer than 50 women; not all who face execution are partnered or straight, of course, but outside partners of those on Death Row are predominantly women. Details of active death warrants and much useful background at Death Penalty Information Center.