“Practiced?”

“Until Wade Cain made honest law impossible.”

I invited him in. He sat at the same kitchen table where the stain from my broken coffee cup still marked the wood, and slowly opened his satchel — less like luggage than a burden he’d carried for years.

“Your father came to see me,” he said. “About six weeks before he died.”

I kept both hands flat on the table. “Why?”

“He figured out what Wade Cain was doing. Not just the land deals. The whole system.” Harold removed a thick folder. “False appraisals. Fraudulent liens.