“Shane, I heard all of it. Police are three minutes out. Stay exactly where you are. Do not go back in there.”

I didn’t.

Two patrol officers came up the stairs. The man, Vince, tried to talk first, of course.

“That convict attacked me! He’s on parole! Arrest him!”

One officer looked at the cut on my cheek. The other looked at Riley’s eye.

Then the teenagers played the video.

Vince was arrested in the hallway for assaulting a child and assaulting me. When the officers searched the apartment, they found a belt hanging on Riley’s bedroom door.

Riley told them everything. Two years. Since he’d moved in. Since he’d told Trish to stop visiting me, because “convicts are a bad influence.”

He’d been taking her mother’s paychecks too.

Officer Faust showed up an hour later in person. She looked at my face, then at Riley holding onto my sleeve.

“For the record,” she said, “a parolee who stops a man from hitting a child, without throwing a single punch, and calls his parole officer first? That’s not a violation.”