I had let Dulce persuade me that their warnings were greed, and I had said things to them — cold, dismissive things — that a father should never say to children who love him.

When Ivana put her arms around my neck and forgave me in the same breath she wept, forgave me without conditions, I understood the true scale of what I had nearly thrown away, and it was not the money and it was not even my life.

It was this.

It was the two people at that table who had gone on loving me through a year of my foolishness, who had picked up the phone the moment I called after months of my coldness, who did not make me grovel or explain but simply came.

Dulce had spent a year teaching me that my children did not care.

And here was the proof, in the form of my daughter crying into my shoulder and my son already turning the pages of the binder with the grim focus of a man preparing to defend his father — that the love I had been persuaded to doubt had never wavered at all.