He wanted to turn around and walk back in through the gates, return his civilian clothes to where they’d stored them all this time, go back to his old cell and stretch out in that bunk and let the prison walls envelop him, protect him from the outside just as much as they protected the outside from people like him. He’d have said he was scared to be out in this world, except fear was a reaction you learned to hide damn fast on the inside. You learned to push it down, ignore it, until it just went away and you didn’t feel scared anymore. The guys who got scared were the guys who didn’t survive.

But there was no turning back, and Mason wouldn’t have anyway, even if his sister hadn’t been standing leaned up against a dusty Dodge Grand Caravan, hands in her coat pockets, squinting across the lot at him, studying her younger brother as he took his first steps back out into the world.

She took her hands from her pockets, gave him a little wave, shy and stilted. “Hi, Mase,” she said, avoiding his eyes as he came across the pavement toward her. “Looks like you made it.”

“We thought you could live with us for a while, me and Glen and the girls,” Maggie said as she drove out of the parking lot and set the minivan on a two-hundred-mile course to the south. “There’s a spare room in the basement you can stay in, rent-free, just so long as you keep out of trouble.”

She was two years his senior, but it might as well have been twenty; she kept sneaking glances across at him like she was wondering who he was, wondering if he was still capable of doing the things he’d done long ago. Mason sat in the passenger seat and felt her eyes on him, and he looked out at the world as it passed his window. His stomach churned with the first stirrings of motion sickness.

“Glen said he could line up a job for you too.” Maggie’s voice was all forced cheer and fragile hope. “He says they’re always looking for good, hardworking men.”

Mason cleared his throat. “What does he do again?”

“Glen?” Maggie blinked. “Well, he’s a real estate agent, Mase.” She looked at him again. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be like you were working for him, exactly, just they sometimes need people to clean the houses they’re selling, do minor repairs, that kind of thing.”

“Clean houses,” Mason said.

“I mean, it wouldn’t have to be forever, just until you got on your feet, right?”

“I thought I might stay at Mom’s old place,” he said.

Maggie’s look was half pity, half wishful thinking, like she and Glen had probably had a hell of a fight about giving Mason that spare room, and familial duty had only barely won out.