It was not humiliation, and it was not anger.

It was purpose.

Lucas had not stumbled into my family.

He had spent his entire adult life becoming precisely the kind of man who takes apart machines like the one that had crushed his family — becoming a public defender, and then, over years, an investigator of the powerful — and he had found, at the end of that long road, that the machine ran straight through the father of the woman he loved.

He had carried that alone, for months, rather than let it touch our wedding day.

“I’m going to make sure,” I said into his chest, “that every single person who did this answers for it.