You could stay where everything’s already yours.”

I understood what he was doing before he’d finished the sentence, and the understanding went through me cold.

He wasn’t fighting for his daughter because he couldn’t bear to lose her.

He was reaching for a lever.

If he could keep Willa — if he could make her want to stay — then I couldn’t leave the state, not cleanly, not without a custody fight that would drag across a courtroom and a calendar.

He was trying to use a fifteen-year-old as an anchor to hold me in place.