I cast my mind back to everything Stefan had said about his life in prison. It wasn’t much. Twice, early on, he showed up in the visitors’ room with an angry bruise on his cheek; once, he was limping; another time, his arm was in a sling. But he wouldn’t talk about that. He might, he said, someday, if there was a reason. All he would tell us was, “They don’t like people who hurt women.”

For almost three years, he’d done almost nothing beyond his assigned jobs, except reading and working out, hours of running in place, of push-ups and sit-ups and leg presses. Always more interested in sports and movies and Belinda than in school, Stefan found it comical when people inevitably called him “Professor,” because he had started college there in a place where most people hadn’t finished high school. (“I read all your books, Mom, all the Russians, all the Victorians, all the American Romantics...”) The associate’s degree he’d earned was in English Lit.

In a single grim sentence, he explained that exercise helped keep your body and your head working, so you, in turn, could keep people away from you. I’d seen those people, bulging, pebble-eyed men, squirming with tats. A couple of them apparently “jumped up” for him—protected him—after he taught them to read. He was gabby only about that, the thrill of seeing the world open to people when they could read.

That was the one good thing. The rest of it at least was over.

We were still laughing, in bursts, when we walked out into the parking lot. The snow slacked off to a sprinkle, as it sometimes does toward evening, and spires of light pierced the clouds. The yellow eyes of the snowplows came prowling in convoys. Stefan saw the flyer under the windshield wiper before I did, but I noticed that there were no other, similar ones under the wipers of other cars. He grabbed the paper and turned to me, his eyes drained. It was a photo of us outside the prison, when Stefan put his hand on top of my head. Through it was drawn a slash, in thick red marker. Stefan said, “What?”

Suddenly I felt we were no longer in the parking lot of a pancake house on a darkening late winter afternoon, but instead in a blind dark alley where heavy footsteps scraped from corners we couldn’t see. I forgot that I wasn’t talking until Stefan prompted me, “Mom? Aren’t you going to say anything but, well, well, well...?”