With Cody safe, the sane thing, the thing every cell in my body wanted, was to go to that station and hold my son and never let either of us near the Ashgrave name again.

No one would have blamed me.

But I had learned something in six months of a widow’s insomnia and one week inside that house: that a man like Dax does not stop.

Convicted of fraud, he would appeal; released someday, he would come back; and even from a cell he could reach a child who held nearly half of what he believed was his.

A paper case might jail him.