So don’t tell me you know what he did.

I know what he did.

I cleaned it up.”

His eyes were wet, but he didn’t back down.

“I’m not asking you to forgive him.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want you to trust me.”

And that stopped me, because every instinct I had was screaming to forbid it, to shield him, to tell him that man had no right to walk back in after fourteen years of silence and stand in the good light of the best night of his life.