The answer made the whole rotten structure clearer. Greg had not just stolen money meant for Rachel and Mia. He had made himself useful, necessary, dangerous. He had planted himself between Daniel’s fear and the truth, and he had grown fat on both.
“How long?” I asked.
Daniel rubbed his forehead. “Maybe years. I don’t know when it started. He always had a reason. A problem he could fix. A document he could carry. A payment he could route. I let him too close.”
Mia looked at him with a kind of exhausted disbelief. “You let the wrong person do the things a father should have done.”
That hit him hard. I could see it.
Another knock came, louder this time.
Then Greg’s voice floated through the shop.
“Daniel, come on. Don’t make this a scene.”
I saw Mia flinch so hard her whole body jerked.
“Stay back from the door,” I whispered to her.
Daniel muttered, “He knows I’m here.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “He called your phone from the sidewalk.”
Greg knocked again, then spoke in the same smooth voice. “I only want to help straighten this out.”
Mia let out a shaky laugh that sounded almost like crying. “That’s what he says right before something bad happens.”
I looked at Daniel. “Did he ever hurt Rachel?”
Daniel’s silence was too long.
“Did he?”
He answered carefully, like every word had nails in it. “I don’t know for sure.”
“That is not good enough.”
“I heard things,” he admitted. “Rachel once told me he showed up at her apartment uninvited. Another time Greg said she was becoming unstable. I believed him instead of her.”
I pressed a hand to my chest.
My own son.
The pain of that sat deeper than anger. Anger is hot. This was cold. This was the ache of seeing how cowardice can dress itself up as ambition and call itself necessity.
Greg knocked a fourth time.
Then the cheerful voice vanished.
“Open the door, Daniel.”
Even through the wall, the threat in it was plain.
Daniel took a breath and stood straighter. “I need to talk to him.”
“No,” Mia said at once.
“No,” I agreed.
“If I don’t, he may force this.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“He may call someone. He may create a story first.”
I stared at him, then said, “For once in your life, stop trying to manage the truth and just tell it.”
He looked at me, really looked, and something shifted. Maybe not enough to erase what he had done. Nothing could do that. But maybe enough to move one inch toward being the man he should have been years ago.
He nodded slowly. “You’re right.”
I was so surprised, I almost missed Mia’s sharp intake of breath.
Daniel unlocked his phone and opened a recording app. Then he looked at Mia.
“Would you trust me for five minutes?”
She stared at him with red, swollen eyes. “No.”
The honesty of it landed hard.
He accepted it with one quiet nod. “Fair.”
Then he looked at me. “Would you trust me for five minutes?”
