In late August 2022, my wife Sarah and I were in the delivery ward at a hospital in Cincinnati for the birth of our second child. She had already been in labor for a number of hours when the doctor came over and said, “Ready to have a baby?”
“Yes,” Sarah replied.
Her contractions were being graphed on the monitor next to her bed, and the doctor told her she could begin actively pushing in rhythm with each contraction. Not too long later, our son emerged.
It was a scene I had experienced once before. But as our second son came into the world, tears streamed down my face. In that moment, I understood them as tears of elation, but in retrospect, there was more to it than that. I was experiencing a deeper recognition of everything that goes into a complete life: the journey of becoming oneself; the trial and error of integrating into the world around us; the inevitable joys and sorrows that come from being alive. My son was at the very beginning of all of it.
This beautiful moment co-existed with an inescapable realization: Sometime in the not-too-distant future, for a duration still unknown, I’d likely have to say goodbye to this sweet new baby and report to prison.
This part of my story begins in November 2020. Sarah and I had been married for four-and-a-half years and had a one-and-a-half-year-old son when our family’s trajectory encountered extreme turbulence: I was federally indicted from an elaborate FBI sting operation. (You can read about the whole wild legal saga in these pages.) I was determined to fight the case every step of the way, and by late 2021, my trial date was looming six months out.
