I'm really enjoying this! I particularly like how you're doing Neal's post-prison vulnerability. It's not over the top, but it's unusually real, I think--he missed four years of his life, and it's showing in dozens of little and big ways. (Also, I loved the souffle-making moment when he tells El that Peter would never let her go to prison, and then realizes that Peter wouldn't keep *him* out of prison. Poor Neal.)

True love waits! Hee.

I also like the slow process of it dawning on Neal that *he* might, against all the odds, be a sweet, unspoiled guy (and maybe Moz is too), but basically *everyone else he used to know is a jackass*. This seems like a really important mid-to-late-20s realization: when you stop defending your friends against Authority, because your friends are Your Friends and Authority Is Always Wrong, and start growing up enough to realize that sometimes Authority is actually the Good Guys, and sometimes your friends don't deserve to be your friends. I think Neal's assumed that the con game is fun and basically harmless and a great way of making money, and that because he himself would never hurt anyone, that means that all criminals are basically heart of gold. And now he's coming to realize that in fact that is not true.