My in-laws’ place swallows noise. The minute we turn off the highway onto gravel, the world shrinks to wind in the oaks and my daughters’ laughter. Claire, still in her pink princess dress, leaps over a mud puddle like it’s a castle moat. Emma sprints to the barn, calling for her pony, Peanut.

Meredith moves with easy farm grace, hair messy, cheeks windburned. I watch her cross the yard and think about the day I met her in the campus bookstore—philosophy book in hand, a smile like a dare. She’s always felt like a choice, not an accident. Mine.

Dinner is Nancy’s best—roast chicken, buttery mashed potatoes, apple slaw tasting like autumn. After the girls settle, Phil pulls me aside behind the barn.

“You’re a good man, Dixon,” he says, “but you need to divorce my daughter.” I wait for a joke. There isn’t one.

He hands me a box—inside, stacks of cash and my old arrest records. I nearly throw up. The past I hid is laid bare.

Back home, Meredith confronts a man on our porch—Steve, obsessed with her since they were teens, her father’s best friend’s son. She tells him to leave. I stand beside her.

Meredith learns about my past—the stealing, juvie, the man who helped me change. She’s furious at her father’s schemes but stands with me.

We share our truths, and she tells me, “You’re not that boy. You’re the man who chooses us every day.” Weeks later, at a county fair, with sticky fingers and laughter, she promises, “I will never choose them over us.”

Phil thought secrets and money could break us. He was wrong. Whatever we’ve built can weather anything.

No box, no bluff, no ghost from before us will undo that.