Now, it seemed important to hurry Stefan to the car, to get out of there before this new universe recanted. We had a long drive back from Black Creek, where the ironically named Belle Colline Correctional Facility squatted not far from the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Black Creek. Stefan’s terrible journey had taken him from college to prison, a distance of just two miles as the crow flies. I felt like the guard: I never wanted to see the place again. I had no time to think about Jill or anything else except the weather. We’d hoped that the early-daylight release would keep protestors away from the prison gates, and that seemed to have worked: Prisoners usually didn’t walk out until just before midday. There was not a single reporter here, which surprised me as Jill was tireless in keeping her daughter Belinda’s death a national story, a symbol for young women in abusive relationships. Many of the half dozen or so stalwarts who still picketed in front of our house nearly every day were local college and high-school girls, passionate about Jill’s work. As Stefan’s release grew near, their numbers rose, even as the outdoor temperatures fell. A few news organizations put in appearances again lately as well. I knew they would be on alert today and was hoping we could beat some of the attention by getting back home early. In the meantime, a snowstorm was in the forecast: I never minded driving in snow, but the air smelled of water running over iron ore—a smell that always portended worse weather.

Once outside the gates, we headed for the highway and a restroom where Stefan could change outfits.

He had asked me only one thing—to bring shoes and clothes and a coat. And I had. But although over the course of more than a hundred visits it should have been obvious to me, I had never fully realized until now how, when he went in, he was only a boy of seventeen, five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds. And by now he had grown three inches taller. The flight parka that seemed so huge on him the last Christmas he spent at home wouldn’t even close over shoulders hardened by intervening years of obsessive solitary exercise. His feet were probably a size bigger, too. In my eagerness to bring Stefan things that were his own, familiar shirtsleeves I had rubbed between my hands when the days and nights were too long, I had not stopped to consider just how ruthlessly time had passed. Maybe I didn’t want to know that.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.

“Sure it does,” I said. “What else does?”