“And the very next day, my own daughter walks into this room and tells me she’s carrying that same young man’s child.

Julian’s child.

Do you understand what that meant?

It meant Vale’s threat had just walked through my front door wearing my daughter’s face.

It meant that of everyone in this county, the person Vale would come for next, the person most tied to that boy and his evidence, was you.” He said it and then he had to stop, because the enormity of it had caught up with him again, the impossible corner he had been backed into that night ten years ago.

“You have to understand the position I was in,” he said, when he could go on.