Mason hadn’t grown up religious. His mom had dragged both him and Maggie to the local Baptist church when they were youngsters, and as far as Mason knew, his mother had kept going long after she’d given up trying to force her son’s attendance. He was already sloughing off the Sunday services by the time he turned a teenager; figured he’d given the Lord twelve years to make his gospel stick, and it hadn’t. There were better things to do on a Sunday.

Maggie had kept going, more to placate her mother than out of any religious fervor. Mason wondered how long she’d kept it up, if she still went, if she ever felt she gained anything from it.

The library at the Chippewa pen had been a limited one, but Mason figured he’d read every book in there at least a couple of times before he finally picked up a Bible. The library had had plenty of those.

By that point in his incarceration, Mason was through feeling sorry for himself. He was through wishing he’d done something different, through being angry: at the world for how it had raised him, at himself for all the ways he hadn’t resisted. He felt guilt, above all, and an encompassing shame, a desire to be better than the angry, violent boy he’d been when he arrived there.

He built his body in the gym, day after day. He kept his head down, and he stayed out of trouble. And he read, every night, from the Bible and anything else he could find, and little by little, he laid himself guidelines, a blueprint for living better when he was finally free.

“Let the thief no longer steal,” read Ephesians, “but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”

The bus ticket to Deception Cove would cost Mason $161.50. Glen and Maggie drove him to the bus station directly from the bank, where Glen had handed Mason an envelope with twenty crisp hundred-dollar bills inside. Glen had played it cool, even cracked a joke, like, “You don’t have to count it, it’s all there,” but Maggie had shushed him, avoided looking at Mason as he climbed back into Glen’s Grand Caravan, and Glen had pulled out of the lot.

They were like a whole other species, Mason thought, watching his sister and her husband from the back seat of the minivan. Or Mason was the other species; his sister was living the normal life, doing exactly what a thirty-five-year-old woman was supposed to be doing: raising a family, paying a mortgage, saving for retirement. Meanwhile, Mason, thirty-three himself, had no skills, no money, no job, had wasted nearly two decades when he could have been learning self-reliance and normalcy and how to open a checking account.