She didn’t care much about Christmas this year, simply hadn’t caught the spirit. But when she thought of what the rest of her night would be like if she didn’t go with him, she stood up and started putting away the food. “Why not?”

6

It’d been a long time since Tobias had felt the “magic” of Christmas. His mother had never had a lot of money, but when she wasn’t spending everything she did have on drugs or alcohol, she’d tried to make the holidays special. As a kid, he’d loved December. Some years, it was the only time he got new clothes, which he always needed because he grew so fast.

Once he went to prison, however, December became the hardest month of the year. The days were shorter and the nights longer, the weather was cold and dreary, and not being able to spend Christmas with Maddox and his mother had made him feel as though his sentence would last forever. Inmates were served a better meal on the twenty-fifth—ham, corn, a Jell-O salad, a dinner roll and scalloped potatoes, with a piece of pie for dessert—but it was still cafeteria food, which was never good to begin with. And there were no gifts, nothing like that.

Actually, there were gifts—just not the kind he cared to remember. His first year behind bars, he’d come back from the mess hall to find a bag of candy on his bed. As inconsequential as that might sound to someone on the outside, he’d been barely more than a kid at the time and in prison everything was bartered like money, even candy. Problem was, he couldn’t accept it. His cellmate warned him that doing so would commit him to the guy who’d left it. He’d returned it right away and, about a week later, he’d been cornered and severely beaten.

He’d had to fight a lot until he established himself as someone who wouldn’t tolerate being victimized. He was never sexually assaulted, as he’d feared he would be for the first few years, but rebuffing the men who made advances had nearly cost him a kidney once.

He tried not to dwell on those times. If he did think of the Christmases he’d spent in the belly of the beast, he focused on the extra money his brother always put on his books. That made January more tolerable since he could buy a few extras from the commissary.