He drew the danger entirely onto himself.

He stopped fighting the frame.

He let it close around him.

He took the fall for crimes he did not commit, and he served ten years in prison, so that those men would keep their eyes fixed on him, the disgraced, ruined, imprisoned engineer, and never think to go looking for a woman in hiding and a baby who was never supposed to exist.

He went to prison, Evelyn, so that they would never come looking for you.