I thought juvenile lifer Suave Gonzalez got his happy ending. But then he faced the real world.

When I last spoke with Suave Gonzalez, it felt like an ending — a triumphant, hard-won, happy ending.

It was 2022, and he was five years removed from the prison system that had held him captive for three decades after he was locked up as a juvenile lifer.

He was an artist and an author, and he was living a life with a clearly defined purpose: to advocate for other incarcerated people.

And, in a remarkable twist, he was also a Pulitzer Prize winner — for the podcast that chronicled his extraordinary second chance after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled automatic life-without-parole sentences like his unconstitutional, leading to his release in 2017.

David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez was a success story, a symbol of perseverance and resilience, a mirror to a criminal justice system still learning mercy, and a beacon of what redemption can look like if people — and policies — embrace change.

But, as the powerful second season of Suave, the podcast, reveals, that “happy ending” many of us saw was only the beginning of a new series of struggles. Though Gonzalez left the prison walls behind, he now lived under the long shadow of lifetime parole, a form of supervision he felt made him free on paper only.

“I was good; that’s what everyone assumed, right?” Gonzalez told me when we reconnected recently. But the truth behind the neat narrative was more complicated.

The young buck sentenced to life for first-degree murder at 17 in 1986 is now a 56-year-old man wrestling with a lifetime of ingrained institutionalization and, until recently, untreated trauma in a world that cheered his accomplishments while quietly reminding him of his place.

“I’m not free, not really,” he said. “I’m on parole for the rest of my life. That’s not freedom.”

There are a lot of searing moments in the new season, but an especially memorable one comes when Gonzalez confesses that despite having a car he worked hard for, he’s afraid to drive it — terrified that one wrong turn could put him back behind bars.

“Season One was a story of redemption,” said journalist Maria Hinojosa, whose 29-year journalistic collaboration with Gonzalez began when she met him while giving a talk at the Graterford State Correctional Institution.

Season Two, said Hinojosa — the founder of Futuro Media, which created the podcast — is about the “agony of freedom.”

Agony is the right word, because Gonzalez’s freedom came wrapped in restrictions that included no travel without permission from his parole officer, no interactions with law enforcement, and no contact with old prison friends. It is a life lived under constant scrutiny — a tightrope with no net. And if he slips up once, he will be sent right back to jail.

And yet, in a raw and revelatory moment, Gonzalez tells host and producer Julieta Martinelli that perhaps parole’s structure is also a lifeline — keeping him grounded while other formerly incarcerated people falter and fall.

It’s a gut-punch of a paradox. The very system that binds him may also be what saves him, at least in the beginning.

Freedom, it turns out, is not simple.

Martinelli told me that over the course of recording the second season of the series, she soon realized Gonzalez was dealing with something far bigger and scarier than feeling like he was a passenger in his own life.

“It was also this fear of not being good enough, this fear of failing,” she said.

Suave, the podcast, is very much like Suave, the man — complicated, confounding, and full of questions that reach far beyond the prison walls:

What is freedom?

Is redemption truly possible?

What does happiness really look like?

And the question he’s increasingly asking now as he pursues commutation of his sentence, which could remove some of the more restrictive conditions of his parole:

“If the Supreme Court said it’s unconstitutional to keep a juvenile in prison for life, how is it constitutional to keep that same juvenile on parole for life?”

But the part of Season Two that made the biggest impression on me was the evolution of the professional relationship between Gonzalez — now a producer on the podcast — and Hinojosa and Martinelli.

As my chosen craft struggles to remain essential in these unprecedented times, the podcast exposes something profound and powerful: What journalism could be if it stopped replicating the same systems it claims to critique — when journalism is not extractive or transactional, when it stops parroting paternalistic nonsense like “giving voice to the voiceless” (for the love of Baby Jesus, my fellow journalists, stop saying that!), and instead starts confronting the fact that even the most marginalized among us have never been voiceless.

We just weren’t listening.

And we sure shouldn’t pass on the opportunity to listen now.

Gonzalez’s story is far from over, and, like so many other tales that resemble his, it deserves to be heard.