It was this: her father had never once, in four years, told her he disliked Dane.

He had his opinions — she knew him too well not to know he had them — but he had kept them, because she had made her choice and he respected her right to make it, even to make it wrongly.

That restraint, she understood now, had cost him something.

He had watched his daughter marry into a family that looked down on her, had swallowed his misgivings, had shown up to the holidays and been unfailingly correct with people he could surely see through in a glance.

He had done all of it so as not to be one more person telling a grown woman what to do with her life.

And the very first moment it stopped being about her pride and started being about her child’s safety, he had dropped every ounce of that restraint without a half-second’s hesitation and asked the only question that mattered — are you and Alma safe — and begun, in his quiet and total way, to move.