The honesty in his gaze made my breath hitch in my chest.

“I’m not letting you run back to West Virginia alone,” he said.

“Eleanor will destroy us,” I said, the fear rising in my chest. “She told me she would call the authorities about Johnny and Paul.”

“She can’t touch them,” Nathan said, his voice hard as iron. “I’ve already moved their trust funds to a private bank.”

He squeezed my hands.

“And I have something else,” he said.

He reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook.

The edges were singed with black soot, and the leather was stiff.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s my father’s personal ledger,” Nathan said. “The one he kept before he died.”

He opened the book to a marked page.

“He knew about the adoption,” Nathan said. “And he knew Eleanor was laundering money through her charitable foundations to pay off the birth mother.”

I looked at the neat rows of numbers and dates written in faded blue ink.

“She paid her to stay quiet?” I asked.