Flynn Vance — the corporate executive for whose alleged embezzlement I had spent nearly five years of my life in a maximum-security prison.

Flynn Vance, whom I had not seen since the week before I confessed to a crime I did not commit.

Flynn Vance, who was the father of the four-year-old boy sitting in the slush at his feet, and who did not know it, and had never known it.

But Flynn was not looking at me.

He was staring, transfixed, frozen where he stood, at Mason.

And I understood why, because it was the thing I had watched arrange itself on my son’s small face for four years.