I took a job instead — head of internal compliance at an independent financial firm, catching, now, the kind of fraud that had once caught me — and I told him why.

“You can’t buy this back, Flynn,” I said.

“You don’t get to write a check and make five years disappear.

Mason is your son, and you can be his father — I will never stand between you and that, ever.

But you and me.

That’s going to take time, if it happens at all.