When she was eighteen, Belinda was convicted of stabbing her pimp. She hadn’t meant to kill him, just hurt him. She’d been on the streets since she was fourteen, when her mother stopped the car and told her to get out, and she had learned to take care of herself. Or at least stay alive. She spent the next twenty-two years behind bars. The day she was released from the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, it was raining. She was wearing sweat pants a size too large and a cheap nylon jacket, clothes brought in by a friend the day before. She was lit up, like a girl rushing out to meet her prom date. There was no prom date. There was a clutch of late-middle-aged women from a faith-based group that had connected with her in prison. There was a dog. It was one of the dogs she had helped train as part of a prison-run canine companions program. She briefly hugged the women, then got down on one knee and nuzzled the dog for a long moment. The dog remembered her.