I had to put my coffee down, in that booth, because my hands weren’t steady enough to hold it.

For two days I had sat vigil at that observation window and told myself a story in which I was the strong one, the daughter keeping watch over a helpless parent, doing the one useful thing left to do.

And the story had been exactly backwards.

He had not been helpless and I had not been protecting him.

He had seen the whole design before it closed — the theft, the tracker, the road that ended in a car that wouldn’t stop — and understood that the only way to save me was to make himself the more urgent target, to dangle a dying man and a signable fortune in front of them so that they’d move on him first, in the light, where the law could see.

Every hour I’d spent believing I was guarding him, he’d spent guarding me, from a hospital bed, without a single word he was allowed to say.