She believed he was still afraid of her, and she believed his secret past was still a vulnerability she could exploit.

Both assumptions had been true, once.

Both had quietly stopped being true, and she did not know it.

His fear had been burned away by fatherhood.

And his secret had become, in his hands, not a vulnerability but a weapon, because the same five years of hidden history that made him afraid of exposure also made him the custodian of the evidence that could destroy her.

She thought she was holding a knife to his throat.