Lily had not forgotten.

She kept the backpack the way a person keeps the thing they were holding in the moment their life was given back to them.

And before she closed her bedroom door, his daughter looked up at him and added five words that hit him harder than any betrayal or court document ever had.

“I knew you would come back.” Those words stayed with him as he walked out onto the deck, where the ocean lay dark and vast beneath the moon.

For months, he had thought this nightmare was about an estate worth millions, and a fraudulent contract, and a woman who had infiltrated his life for greed.