Paige stared at me through the bars, stunned.

“After what I did to you,” she said, “you’re buying me a meal?”

I looked back at her, and for the first time I felt no anger toward her at all, only a kind of clear, cool distance.

“I’m not doing it for you,” I said.

“I’m doing it because five years in prison, and a friend who left me in the snow, and a system that threw my whole life away — none of it managed to turn me into the kind of person who locks a door on someone in the cold.

That was the one thing they couldn’t take.