He shouldn’t do it. Jase knew he should stay strong. But suddenly he remembered his old man with a shovel, Edward’s hands so dirty you couldn’t see his nails as he stood beneath the spreading branches of that single tree visible from the living room of the house where Jase and Prescott had grown up, the house that it seemed he might soon own.

“I’ll pay ya back, son, I promise.” A pause. Heavy with portent. “I know things,” he said around a cough.

Now it was Jase’s turn to be silent, but his fingers clenched tightly over his phone and his shoulder muscles tightened.

He heard a lighter click and then a long intake of breath. “I’d hate to tell the family’s dirty little secret, but . . .” A long sigh. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Jase thought about his own reputation, how he’d battled to lose the stink of the poor, tough kid who’d been at odds with the law, maybe even society when he thought about it. His jaw slid to one side as he considered Prescott, now playing the part of a religious man, a pillar in his church, a husband and father.

Trinity and Caleb’s innocent faces came to mind.

They didn’t deserve this. Jase had lived with the threat of his whole life unraveling, but he couldn’t face his niece and nephew carrying that burden with them. They knew nothing of their family’s secrets and shadowy past. It was best to keep it that way.

“You’re resorting to blackmail now?” Jase said, and heard his father take another deep intake of breath, remembered how the tip of Edward’s Camel glowed fiery red as he’d stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, staring into the night while rain had peppered the tin roof of the porch and gurgled down the gutters.

His father replied, “As I said, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.’”

“Bullshit, Dad.”

Another pause. Another drag on the cigarette. Would Jase’s old man really do it? Actually go to the authorities, bring up a decades’ old crime? Or was Ed just blowing smoke? That was the problem with the past, it never really was over and gone. Long-dead misdeeds, buried and forgotten, had a tendency to rise up and sting you.

“I ain’t kiddin’, son.”

Jase felt as if he were being squeezed in his grandfather’s old vise, the one in the barn. Slowly and deliberately his father was turning the handle, making the jaws dig farther and farther into his flesh.

He caved.

Hated himself for it.

“Fine, Dad,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’ll send the check.” God, he was weak. He should have called the old man’s bluff. “It’ll go out tomorrow, but it’s the last time.”