Wade Larue sat next to his lawyer, Sandra Koval.

He wore brand-new clothes. The room did not smell of prison, that horrid combination of decay and disinfectant, of fat guards and urine, of stains that never come out, and that in and of itself was a strange adjustment. Prison becomes your world, getting out an impossible daydream, like imagining life on other planets. Wade Larue had gone inside at the age of twenty-two. He was now thirty-seven. That meant he had spent pretty much all his adult years inside that place. That smell, that horrid smell, was all he knew. Yes, he was still young. He had, as Sandra Koval repeated mantralike, his whole life in front of him.

It didn't feel like that right now.

Wade Larue's life had been ruined by a school play. Growing up in a small town in Maine everyone agreed that Wade had the acting chops. He was a crummy student. He was not much of an athlete. But he could sing and dance and, most important, he had what one local reviewer called  -  this after seeing Wade star as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls sophomore year  -  "supernatural charisma." Wade had that something special, that intangible that separated talented wannabes from the real deals.

Before his senior year of high school, Mr. Pearson, the high-school play director, called Wade into his office to tell him about his "impossible dream." Mr. Pearson had always wanted to put on Man of La Mancha , but he never had a student, not until now, who could handle the role of Don Quixote. Now, for the first time, he wanted to give it a go with Wade.

But come September Mr. Pearson moved away and Mr. Arnett took over as director. He held tryouts  -  usually a formality for Wade Larue  -  but Mr. Arnett was hostile. To the shock of everyone in town he ended up picking Kenny Thomas, a total no-talent, to play Don Quixote. Kenny's father was a bookie and Mr. Arnett, rumor had it, was into him for over twenty grand. You do the math. Wade was offered the role of the barber  -  one song!  -  and ended up quitting.

Here was how naive Wade was: He thought that his quitting would cause a town-wide uproar. High schools are made up of types. The handsome quarterback. The basketball captain. The school president. The lead in every school play. He thought the townsfolk would rally against the injustice that had befallen him. But no one said a thing. At first, Wade figured that they were scared of Kenny's father and his possible mob connections, but the truth was far simpler: They didn't care. Why should they?

It is so easy to inch your way into foul territory. The line is so thin, so flimsy. You just step over it, just for a second, and sometimes, well, sometimes you can't make your way back. Three weeks later Wade Larue got drunk, broke into the school, and vandalized the sets for the play. He was caught by the police and suspended from school.

And so the slide began.

Wade ended up taking too many drugs, moving to Boston to help sell and distribute, grew paranoid, carried a gun. And now here he was, sitting at this podium, a famous felon blamed for the death of eighteen people.

The faces glaring up at him were familiar from his trial fifteen years ago. Wade knew most of the names. At the trial they would stare with a combination of grief and bewilderment, still woozy from the sudden blow. Wade had understood back then, sympathized even. Now, fifteen years later, the glares were more hostile. Their grief and bewilderment had crystallized into a purer cut of anger and hate. At the trial, Wade Larue had avoided the glares. But no more. He kept his head up. He met their eyes. His sympathy, his understanding, had been decimated by their lack of forgiveness. He had never meant to hurt anyone. They knew that. He had apologized. He had paid a huge price. They, these families, still chose hate.

To hell with them.

Sandra Koval waxed eloquent from the seat next to him. She spoke of apologies and forgiveness, of turning corners and transformations, of understanding and the human desire for a second chance. Larue tuned her out. He spotted Grace Lawson sitting next to Carl Vespa. He should have felt tremendous fear seeing Vespa in the flesh, but no, he was beyond that now. When Wade was first put in prison, he had been badly beaten  -  first by people working for Vespa and then by those hoping to curry favor. Guards included. There had been no escape from the constant fear. Fear, like the smell, had become a natural part of him, his world. Maybe that explained why he was immune to it now.

Larue eventually made friends at Walden, but prison is no character-builder, despite what Sandra Koval was now telling this audience. Prison strips you down to your barest state, the state of nature, and what you do to survive is never pretty. No matter. He was out now. That was in the past. You move on.

But not quite yet.

The room was beyond silent, a vacuuming feel, as if the very air had been sucked out of it. The families all sat there, unmoved both physically and emotionally. But there was no energy there. They were hollow entities, devastated and powerless. They could not hurt him. Not anymore.

Without warning Carl Vespa rose. For a second  -  no longer than that  -  Sandra Koval was thrown. Grace Lawson stood too. Wade Larue could not understand why they were together. It made no sense. He wondered if it changed anything, if he would soon meet Grace Lawson.

Did it matter?

When Sandra Koval finished, she leaned over to him and whispered, "Come on, Wade. You can take the back way out."

Ten minutes later, out on the streets of Manhattan, Wade Larue was free for the first time in fifteen years.

He stared up at the skyscrapers. Times Square was his first destination. It would be noisy and crowded with people  -  real, live non-convicts. Larue did not want solitude. He did not crave green grass or trees  -  you could see those from his prison cell in the sticks of Walden. He wanted lights and sounds and people, real people, not prisoners, and yes, perhaps, the company of a good (or better, bad) woman.

But that would have to wait. Wade Larue checked his watch. It was almost time.

He started west on Forty-third Street. There was still a chance to back out of this. He was achingly close to the Port Authority bus terminal. He could hop on a bus, any bus, and start anew someplace. He could change his name, maybe his face a little, and try out for local theater. He was still young. He still had the chops. He still had that supernatural charisma.

Soon, he thought.

He needed to clear this up. Put it behind him. When he was being released, one of the prison counselors had given him the standard lecture about this being either a new start or a bad end, it was all up to him. The counselor was right. Today he would either put this all behind him or he would die. Wade doubted that there would be an in between.

Up ahead he saw a black sedan. He recognized the man leaning against the side, his arms crossed. It was the mouth you couldn't forget, the way the teeth were all twisted together. He had been the first to beat Larue all those years ago. He wanted to know what had happened the night of the Boston Massacre. Larue had told him the truth: He didn't know.

Now he did.

"Hey, Wade."

"Cram."

Cram opened the door. Wade Larue slid into the back. Five minutes later they were on the West Side Highway heading toward the endgame.