“No,” Julian said sharply.
Harrison looked back.
“Dad, she’s had two years to prepare. If you confront her without evidence strong enough to freeze accounts and protect witnesses, she’ll run. Or she’ll say I’m an impostor. Or she’ll use the clinic records to claim I’m mentally unstable.”
“You think she’d hurt you again?”
Julian’s silence answered.
Harrison’s face hardened. For two years he had been a grieving father. In that room, he became something else again: the man who had built bridges across rivers, towers over Manhattan, and a company from a rented office with one phone line.
“All right,” he said. “Then we do this correctly.”
Julian breathed out. “There’s one person you can trust.”
“My brother.”
“Uncle Graham?”
Harrison nodded. “Graham is a financial crimes attorney. Deborah hates him because he never trusted her.”
“Then call him from a phone she can’t monitor.”
Harrison looked at his son, amazed by the steel in him. The boy who had once stormed out over music had come back wounded, hunted, and strategic.
“You’ve grown up,” Harrison said softly.
Julian’s mouth bent into a sad smile. “I had to.”
Before they separated, Harrison held him again.
“I thought losing you was my punishment,” he said. “But the truth is worse. You were alive, and you thought I had abandoned you.”
