But still. I know she would pay that price to be with her father. We would both gladly pay that price, again and again, if it meant we could all be together.

I try to find comfort in that. Except there is something else gnawing at me—something Grady is skirting around that isn’t sitting right—something that I can’t hold in my hands just yet.

“Here’s what you’ve got to understand,” he says. “Nicholas Bell is a bad man. Even Owen didn’t want to accept how bad of a man he was, not for a long time, probably because Kate was loyal to her father. And Owen was loyal to Kate, and to Charlie, who Owen was quite close to, as well. They believed their father was a good man with some questionable clients. And they convinced Owen of that. They convinced him that Nicholas was a defense attorney, doing his job. No illegal activity of his own. They convinced him because they loved their father. They thought he was a good father, a good husband. He was a good father, a good husband. They weren’t wrong. He is just other things too.”

“Like what?”

“Like complicit in murder. And extortion. And drug trafficking,” he says. “Like completely and totally unrepentant for how many lives he helped ruin. Like how many people whose entire fucking world he helped destroy.”

I try not to show it on my face, how that gets to me.

“These men that Nicholas worked for are ruthless,” he says. “And unforgiving. There’s no telling what kind of leverage they would use to get Owen to turn himself in.”

“They could go after Bailey?” I say. “That’s what you’re saying? That they’d go after Bailey to get to Owen?”

“I’m saying, unless we move her quickly, it’s a possibility.”

That stops me, even in the heat of this. What Grady’s insinuating. Bailey being in danger. Bailey, who is wandering the streets of Austin alone, potentially already in danger.

“The point is, Nicholas won’t stop them,” he says. “He couldn’t stop them even if he wanted to. That’s why Owen had to get Bailey out. He knew Nick’s hands weren’t clean in any of this. And he used that information to hurt the organization. Do you understand that?”

“Maybe you should say it slower,” I say.

“Nicholas wasn’t always dirty, but at some point he started passing messages for leadership, from lieutenants in prison to leadership outside of prison. Messages that couldn’t be sent another way except through a lawyer. And these weren’t innocent messages. These were messages like who needs to be punished, like who needs to be killed. Can you imagine knowingly passing along a message that would result in a man and his wife being killed and their two kids being left without parents?”

“And where does Owen come in?”