“But believing you isn’t enough, Vesper.

Belief doesn’t hold up in a courtroom.

What we need is evidence — clean, provable, the kind no expensive lawyer can wave away.

And we need to get it without getting your son hurt, which is the hard part, because right now that boy and whatever he’s hidden are the same thing keeping each other alive.”

There was something steadying in Harlan that I have never quite been able to name, and I think it came from my father.

The two of them had come up together, decades ago, and Harlan carried in his bearing the same quality my father had — an old-fashioned, unshowy solidity, the sense of a man who had seen the worst the world does to people and had decided, in response, to simply be reliable.