“It is,” he interrupted, voice hoarse but urgent. “You need to understand why he hates me. Why he did this.”

The wind howled around us, carrying his words like confessions into the trees.

He explained how, twenty-five years earlier, while running his small construction company, he’d been caught in a financial bind. He borrowed money from a loan shark in Atlanta — money he couldn’t repay. The interest ballooned. When the threats came, he panicked. Instead of protecting his family, he offered something unthinkable: his silence and cooperation in laundering money through his business.

“It wasn’t just once,” Robert muttered. “It went on for years. Cash moving in and out. The business survived, but it poisoned everything. The FBI came sniffing once, but I made a deal. I turned in partners — men who trusted me. And one of them… one of them was Emily’s father.”

The name struck me like a hammer. “Emily’s father?”

“Yes. I testified against him. He went to prison. He died there. Emily has never forgiven me. And Daniel…” Robert’s voice cracked. “Daniel blames me for the life he never had. The house we lost, the shame he felt at school, the nights you cried when I disappeared to ‘business meetings.’ He grew up hating me, Maggie. And when he met Emily, when she told him what happened to her father… they had a bond stronger than anything we could break.”