The day was basically shot. Between waiting for everyone else to finish up and waiting for Big Vinnie to come get us, it was midafternoon before we headed back to Roxbury. Big Vinnie made a habit of going to Nickie’s while his busload of riders were doing the prison visits. Nickie’s was a pub a short drive away, and it was supposedly a popular pit stop for guards going to and coming off their shifts. One time I overheard Big Vinnie bragging that every Saturday, after dropping us off, he was at Nickie’s door like clockwork in time for the opening bell, ten a.m. He seemed proud that the owner, a guy named Tony (there was no Nickie), had given him and four other regulars waiting at the door the nickname “the Starting Five.” Like they were some kind of basketball team. Besides Big Vinnie, there was a guy named Ziggie, plus Paul, Pete, and Mary. Tony would let them in, and the Starting Five would climb onto their barstools and enjoy the first pour of the day. Big Vinnie stayed through lunch and then came back in his van for us. Riding home to Boston, Marlon Williams’s mother made sure to sit directly behind Big Vinnie, keeping a close eye on his every move.

Back home I went into my bedroom and stood in front of my bureau. I looked into the circular mirror balanced on top and leaning against the wall. I was thinking about what Mr. White had said. It was true: in the past year I had really grown a lot — like almost four inches — and I was now more than five feet tall, almost as tall as Ma, who was five foot three. I could easily be mistaken for fifteen or sixteen, that’s for sure. It was also true I was built thin and bony like Ma. My aunt worried I was too skinny and was always trying to get me to eat more. But I ate plenty, and I think my thinness had more to do with the fact I’d grown so fast.

I tried smiling, and my mouth, the way I smiled, did look a lot like Ma’s. I opened my eyes wide, and I could see what the guard meant when he said my eyes were big, round, and brown, like Daddy’s, especially when I smiled. Like never before, I could see real traces of both Ma and Daddy in me, in an adult kind of way. It felt a little confusing, spotting the grown-up changes in my face. I was still a kid.

I looked at the photographs that circled the mirror. The one time each year that the prison let Ma take a picture of Daddy and me was on my birthday. We’d hold a little birthday party in the visiting room, just my parents and me, and before we left, Ma was allowed to snap a picture using one of those disposable cameras you can buy at CVS. I had arranged the birthday photographs clockwise around the mirror on my bureau, pinching the edge of each picture between the glass and the chipped wood frame.

The first couple of years, when I was still a baby, my daddy was cradling me, looking proud and smiling into the camera. But once I could stand on my own, the pose was always the same, with me leaning into Daddy’s legs, my arms around him, and his arm around me.

Around the time I started to walk, I also started asking Daddy the same question at the end of our weekly visits. Every time, the same question, like if you put a word bubble next to me in every photo from when I was a toddler through elementary school, the question was the same, year after year.

“Daddy,” I would ask, “when you comin’ home?”

The photos were kind of like a calendar marking the years. First I stood at his hip, then his waist, and then his chest, and, last year, my head was tucked into his shoulder. In the beginning, I wore outfits that Ma got for me at Marshalls — little girly things, usually matching pink tops with leggings and with lots of frills. The older I got, the more I had a say in what I was going to wear. You can tell from looking at the pictures that I was trying to be fashion conscious, but, me being me, I could never quite pull it off. I’m basically always wearing sneakers, too, mainly because when I was little, I realized how much I liked running hard and running fast. I wear sneakers because I always want to be ready to run, to grab that good feeling that comes with doing it. To me, if a soft breeze comes up behind me, it’s like someone has put their hand on my shoulder and is nudging me to get going, take off, and to run like the wind and to even become part of it. Anyway, the point is I might get dressed up, but when you look below my ankles and see my sneakers, it kind of bursts the fashion bubble. This past year is a good example. For my birthday I combed my hair out straight and tied it back in a bun, and I picked a nice black skirt with a layered, maroon-striped tank top. It all looked pretty cool. But then my feet were in orange-and-black tiger-striped Nike Windrunners — which I’d saved up for months to buy.

In the pictures I am smiling the big, toothy smile Officer White says reminds him of Ma, and that’s because I’m as happy as I can be spending my birthday with Daddy. There’s one picture, though, where something’s not right. I’m hugging Daddy’s waist, and he sure looks happy and proud to be with me, but you can tell I’m forcing the smile. I’m trying, but the look is halfhearted.

Mainly it’s in my eyes. There’s no spark, and instead you see sadness. It’s from five years ago, when I was in third grade and I was turning nine. Daddy kept asking me, “What’s wrong, Trell?” But I wouldn’t tell him. I didn’t want to ruin the birthday visit. He could tell, though, and he kept giving me looks, and so I’d make a pouty face back at him and shake my head, trying to be funny.

When I got home, though, I wrote him a letter. Ever since I was little, I’ve written to him. In first grade when I learned the alphabet, the first thing I told Ma was I wanted to write to Daddy. So I wrote him a lot, and I made drawings with crayons for him, and I sent him cards on other holidays. He wrote me back, and sometimes his letters were basically little stories that he had made up, stories that always began, “This is a story about a princess named Trell.”

This time I wrote him about what was bothering me. It was his case, and what people always said about him. For some reason right before my birthday that year there were stories on TV and in the newspaper mentioning him. I didn’t really understand why, but different people were trying to get elected mayor and they kept bringing up Daddy’s case when they were talking about safety in the city, the street gangs, and violence. The newspaper articles called Daddy a murderer, and I got really upset. I looked at the articles thinking all kinds of thoughts. I knew what they said was wrong, but there it was, in the paper. So I knew people were getting the wrong message. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to call the reporters and ask them “Why? How could you?” But how do you get them to print the right message?

The worst part, though, was in school. After the TV and newspaper stories, some kids gave me a hard time. Not my friends — they wouldn’t say anything. But other kids said things. Especially one kid named Paul Parish. It’s like meanness runs in his family. His uncle, Lamar “Thumper” Parish — well, everybody knows about Thumper Parish.

Thumper Parish is this scary, older guy — he’s like around Daddy’s age — who rides around in a shiny Mercedes-Benz. He’s huge, like over six feet, always wears dark glasses and dresses in a dark leather coat. He runs a gang, an outfit that moves drugs and guns, and it’s like everyone freezes, like he’s God or something, when he struts through the projects.

He’s that big and bad, and he holes up with his family on Castlegate Road in his idea of a castle — an old Roxbury house built a long time ago, in the early 1900s, when the neighborhood was home to fancier people, so the homes were built with high ceilings and lots of pretty carved wood moldings. Thumper Parish turned the house into a fortress, behind a cement wall, with dogs roaming the grounds, and now him and some relatives live together under the same roof. It’s where Paul Parish lives, and at school he acted like he was some kind of celebrity, but he was really just a mean little kid who watched the news on TV and bothered me with comments: “Your daddy’s never getting out” and “He killed a little girl.” Like it was a joke and he was just being funny. Well, I got mad and defended Daddy. I defended him with words. I didn’t get into a fight. But I stormed over to Paul Parish and got in his face, and I guess I got to shouting because before I knew it, we were both taken to the principal’s office.

I told Daddy about this in the letter I wrote after our little prison birthday party celebrating me being nine. The very next Saturday, Daddy sat me down and spent the whole visit talking to me about school. He told me he didn’t want me to be getting into trouble. He even said maybe the boy Paul Parish actually liked me, and his meanness was opposite to how he truly felt. “No way,” I said. The only good thing about Paul Parish I ever noticed was he seemed to take his schoolwork seriously, always raising his hand to ask a question or answer one. But like me? “That’s crazy,” I told Daddy. He tilted his head, and said, “Well, maybe so. But you have to just walk away, Trell.” He told me no matter what anyone said about him or the legal case, I had to learn to just walk away. I promised him that I would try.

Daddy also explained why people kept talking about his case and why the newspapers were running stories with his name in them. He said politicians were using the case as a symbol for violence in the city. They were all trying to get elected mayor, and when they were giving speeches to voters about how tough they would be on street crime and how they were the best candidate to bring law and order to the city, it was easy for them to mention his case because a little girl had been murdered. It had become one of the most famous murder cases ever.

“Didn’t you recognize one of their names?” Daddy asked. “In the newspaper stories, the one doing most of the talking about my case, like he was bragging or something?”

I shook my head.

“Frank Flanagan?”

I shook my head again.

“District Attorney Frank Flanagan,” Daddy said, “the guy who came after me?”

“Ohhh,” I said. Yep, I had heard Ma and Daddy mention his name — the man who had had Daddy arrested in 1988 and then got him convicted at the trial a year later. Daddy explained Frank Flanagan was running to get elected as mayor of Boston and was campaigning as the toughest of crime fighters.

I have to say, the things people said about Daddy hurt me and were hard to take, whether they came from Paul Parish in school or from the DA Frank Flanagan in the newspaper. Because I know my daddy would never harm a little girl. It would get so frustrating. But I felt better when Daddy was done talking to me about all of this, especially when he explained he was never giving up. He would find a way to fight his conviction no matter what all of the politicians said about him or what the whole city of Boston seemed to think about him as a result.

I hugged him good-bye. “Daddy, when you comin’ home?”

“Trolls, bells, and candy canes,” he said, smiling.