“You know Roman was a teacher, right?” he said and I nodded. “He taught sixth grade and it was a passion for him. He was always winning these best-teacher awards and stuff.”

I remembered meeting Roman, talking briefly with him and his family at the prison’s Christmas dinners. He was almost cartoonishly handsome, like the drawings of Prince Valiant in the old comics sections my parents used to pull from the Sunday newspapers. Sweet, soft-spoken, he was married to a girl he’d known all his life, who meant what she said about better and worse and stuck by him after Roman, who was also a binge drinker, mowed down a mother and daughter, killing the daughter, who had two children of her own. Roman’s little boy, Joey, was at one of those dinners. Roman told us that Joey was the same age as one of his victim’s children.

Stefan said, “You guys only met him a couple times. But I saw Roman and Trina and their little boy all the time because they had those special visiting hours for families to have some private time, but you could invite another inmate in if the guards and the family approved of it.”

While Roman and Trina held hands and talked privately, Stefan used to play with Joey, making puppets out of strips of paper and playing endless rounds of Chutes and Ladders. Trina told Stefan later that whenever he wasn’t around, Joey would ask, where’s that big boy? Does he want to play? “She was just the nicest person. She raises Neapolitan mastiffs as a business and her breeding pair, Churchill and Tosca, they’re champions, worth ten thousand dollars each.” He said she had emailed him when he got out, and I remembered him talking about it at the time. “Trina said that Roman was seriously depressed when I left. I used to keep his mood up a little. We played chess and talked about movies. Now I’m not even allowed to write to him.”

Stefan’s parole conditions stipulated that he could never associate with another former inmate.

While I quickly volunteered to act as the intermediary on behalf of Stefan this time, the next day, I confided in Julie my anxiety about doing this. She stepped up and offered to help me. I lied when I told Stefan I was ready. The Healing Project was way more appealing to me in concept than in actuality.