Billy Cronk was not so lucky. His tours with the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq and Afghanistan left his body unscarred but his spirit shattered. With the help of his family and counselors, he is gluing himself together. But I suspect he will never be fully intact again; there will always be sharp edges not safe to touch.

When Billy came to the hospital to take me home, he looked into my bloodshot eyes and went quiet.

“I look that pretty?” I said.

“No.”

“What then?”

“Have I ever told you you’re my hero?”

“Isn’t that a song?”

I was joking because I could see he was sincere, and it embarrassed me.

“I’m serious, man. You’ve gone through shit in your life that would’ve broken the toughest guys in my brigade.”

“It was your knife that saved me, Billy.”

“The blade is just an extension of the man.”

“Now you sound like a samurai movie.”

But it was those words—that uncomfortably admiring sentiment—that gave me the analogy of the annealing process.

Two nights after returning to my empty house, I celebrated Christmas Eve at the Cronks’ place.

“You sure you won’t let me go with you tomorrow?” he said.

“It’s Christmas morning, Billy! Your first since you got out of prison. You can’t not be here with your family.”

“I’ve already received my gifts.” He smiled at Aimee who was seated with Emma in her lap while the girl read aloud from the new Harry Potter book she’d unwrapped, my present to her. “I don’t deserve the blessings I’ve been given.”

He’d had a few glasses of eggnog and his emotions were running high.

I sipped my own (unspiked) eggnog. The Cronk boys were passing back and forth the personalized jackknives I’d bought (with their mother’s permission) from L.L.Bean. The gifts seemed appropriate after the crucial role Billy’s blade had played in saving my life.

“Is your phone still ringing?” my friend asked.

“I’ve unplugged it.”

The national media had gotten wind of my torment at the hands of the Dows and wanted to interview me. I’d kept silent at the advice of counsel (and my own common sense), but that hadn’t stopped a few online outlets from flailing me for having shot and killed a woman half my weight, ignoring the fact that she’d nearly murdered me. The polemicists wanted Tori Dow to be in death someone she had never been in life. They wanted her to stand for a cause she would have found laughable.

“I still can’t get over it, Mike,” Billy said, lowering his bearish voice. “How you managed to survive everything you did.”

I had worried he might return to the subject of my heroism the deeper he got in his cups. “It was Emma’s magic. Remember she cast protection spells on Shadow and me that morning?”