But the most wrenching moment was the visit from O'Reilly, who joined two other victims for a four-hour encounter in a small, stuffy room overlooking the prison's exercise yard. The victims spoke. Then the inmates -- one by one -- shared the violent, intimate details of their crimes.
One of the convicts then added this: I am truly amazed and humbled, he told the victims, that after all your pain you have come here to talk to people like us.
Tears fell on the prison's concrete floor. For a while afterward, there was only breathing. Nobody said a word.
Thinking Ahead
A pair of men's tennis shoes sit by the front door of the O'Reillys' small Sonoma home. The man who wore them is gone, but his wife can't bear to move them just yet. The same goes for his clothes in the closet they once shared, and his two spare bicycles, hanging in the garage.
At a wedding, Patty O'Reilly watched the beaming bride dance with her father and realized her girls won't have that chance.
But some parts of life are growing brighter. Friends replanted the family garden, and O'Reilly now enjoys snipping dead blooms off the marigolds. Her daughters predict the pumpkin plant will yield a big crop by Halloween.
O'Reilly also is thinking ahead, imagining a drive through rolling hills to the prison in Vacaville where William Albertson sits and waits.
She has decided. Sometime next year, she will meet with the man who took her husband from this world.
