Page 25 of Christmas With the Convict

He has a shotgun braced against his shoulder.

“Dad!” Wendy shrieks and immediately jumps in front of me. “What the hell is wrong with you!?”

My mind kicks into that strange, adrenaline-injected gear reserved for riots and prison fights. I linger on the gun’s wooden stock—how smooth and shiny it looks—and spot the kids, their mother, and Wendy’s aunt in the house’s big window.

Everyone else is outside standing tentatively behind Wendy’s father. His blue eyes are as violent as ever. They don’t move. They don’t blink. They don’t track anything except the target at the end of the gun’s barrel.

Me.

“I got his files, Wendy. You think I wouldn’t find out, convict? I called my buddy with the DA as soon as you got here,” Richard yells in a puff of breath. “I know what you did. Get away from him. He’sdangerous.”

Wendy balls up snow and hurls it at him. “Youasshole!It’s none of your business. He served his time!”

“Once a criminal, always a criminal!”

“Stop it!”

Once a cop, always a cop.

“Do you want to know what he did?”

“Dad,” Wendy cries, falling against me. “Stop, please!”

How different are we, really?

“Do you want to know what kind of man you brought into our home!?”

“Dad!”

“I stabbed a man to death…”

Wendy catches her breath in her throat. She collapses into the snow sobbing.

One by one, I meet the eyes of her family.

They already heard it from Richard. I can tell by the way they look at me, but Wendy is going to hear it from me. I should have told her before I ever got in her car.

“In the chest.” I nod, hands out at my sides. “I was at a bar, and he cracked a bottle over my friend’s head. It started a brawl, and I took his knife and stabbed that man until my arm was numb. They ruled it voluntary manslaughter. Self-defense but—”

“Self-defense,” Richard spits. “You should be in jail for life…”

“I wanted to hurt him,” I say. “You’re right. I was angry. So mad that I couldn’t see anything but the thing I wanted to kill.”

I drop to my knees, holding Wendy from behind.

“But that’s not me anymore.” I look right at her father, right down the barrel of the gun. Slowly, I get Wendy to her feet. She’s shaking and crying, whispering words I can’t understand. “I did my time, sir. Shouldn’t that be the end of it? Haven’t you ever made a mistake? It was almost seven years ago—”

“I don’t give a fuck if it was in another lifetime.” Richard is closing the distance. I step in front of Wendy. “You’re not setting foot in this house again.”

The sound of him racking a shell into the gun stops my heart.

I don’t move.

I put my hands up and wait for this man to decide my fate.

I won’t be that person again.

“NO!”

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