“I thought maybe she’d learned he was alive and was trying to protect him, to pay off the people hunting him.

I wanted to believe that.

And then I overheard a phone call.” She paused.

“She told them they had to find him before the wedding.”

The words settled into the room, and Daniel understood their weight before Maria had to explain it, because he knew the terms of his father’s will as intimately as he knew his own name.

He had lived inside those terms for six years.

Chapter 11 — Before the Wedding