We stood there, me leaning my head on his shoulder, him awkwardly patting my back. Jep came in and put his arms around both of us.

There was a knock at the front door. Jep opened it, and there stood Annalee Ribosky, Charlie’s wife. “Jep, let me apologize for what Charlie said. I’m sorry, and the fact is, he’s sorry as well. We’re not the only people who’ve said things, and that doesn’t make it right.” Jep shook Annalee’s hand. “But we will not say one word behind your back. So I’m sorry, Jep. I’m sorry, Thea. Tell Stefan, too. Charlie made a mistake. Please forgive an old man. Those people out front, they get to you. Whatever you need, Jep, we are right here.”

Jep turned back to the room then. “Stefano, if you could get people like them to believe one thing about you, what would it be?”

“That not everyone is the same,” Stefan said.

If he hadn’t been speaking about himself, and he had not been flesh of my flesh, I would still have been fascinated by what Stefan had to say next. While we stood in the kitchen, he talked to us about what he thought was the real reason that most people reoffended after they got out of jail. He believed that it’s not because they’re intrinsically evil and not because they’re any more susceptible to their peers than anyone else. He pointed out he had watched how the whole concept of being a team relied a lot on what people thought of you—the coach, the other team members, the fans, the school, the community, even history. If you did wrong, or even if you didn’t do all you could, it was a betrayal to all those people, seen and unseen. But habitual criminals, he said, don’t usually have somebody who really wants them to do their best, who motivates them, just people brokenhearted or enraged because they didn’t do their best. Which is sad and awful, but also very ordinary and human. The most common thing that he and his friend Roman, the only real friend he ever made in prison, observed about his fellow criminals was surprisingly how easily they got bored. Most didn’t have the patience for going through a process, trying and failing and trying again. Maybe the first time they had to do that was in prison, but it was a whole new thing for them. “Like, in their brain. Their brain isn’t usually used to that,” Stefan said. “Trying and failing and trying again is not exciting. Doing a crime is really exciting—not, like, me, comatose, but doing a robbery or a burglary, it had to feel really exciting...living on the knife’s edge, anything could go wrong, it’s like a race against time, the Olympics of being bad.”