My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

“I’ve been digging into Sue Melton,” he said. His voice carried the contained intensity of a man who had smelled rot under floorboards and begun pulling them up. “Your records request opened some doors. I think this goes back a long time.”

William sat at his office desk while Owen colored at the rug near his feet. “How long?”

“Decades.”

They met two days later at a quiet diner outside town because William didn’t want the man at his house and didn’t want to be seen in public somewhere easily photographed. Angelo spread folders across the table between coffee cups. He had the pale, sleepless look of people who spend too much time with archives and too little with sunlight.

“Sue was married three times,” Angelo said. “The first marriage ended after her husband’s daughter from a previous relationship died by suicide at sixteen.”

William froze.