I don’t say anything. He isn’t looking for me to say anything. He is looking to make his point, which is when he starts to get there.
“Ethan blamed me for what happened to Kate. He blamed the men I worked for when they had nothing to do with it. She was working for a Texas Supreme Court judge, a very influential Texas Supreme Court judge? Did you know that?”
I nod. “I did.”
“Did you know this judge had shifted the Texas court sharply to the left and was imminently set to cast the deciding vote against a large energy corporation, the second largest in the country? If you want to talk about real criminals, these gentlemen were dispelling highly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at a clip that could make your eyes swell shut.”
He watches me.
“My point is that this judge, Kate’s boss, was writing a majority opinion against the corporation. It would lead to sweeping reform and cost the energy corporation close to six billion dollars in improved conservation efforts. And the day after my daughter was killed, the judge came home to a bullet in his mailbox. What does that sound like to you? A coincidence? Or a warning shot?”
“I don’t know enough,” I say.
“Well, Ethan decided he knew enough. He couldn’t be reasoned with that the men I had spent two decades protecting wouldn’t do that to my daughter. That I knew these men and they had their own code of honor. That wasn’t how they did things. Even their most nefarious colleagues didn’t do things like that unprompted. But Ethan didn’t want to believe it. He just wanted to blame me. And he wanted to punish me. As if I wasn’t punished enough.” He pauses. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.”
“I understand that,” I say.
“Your husband didn’t. That was the part he could never understand about me,” he says. “After his testimony, I spent six and a half years in prison as opposed to putting my family at risk by sharing my employer’s secrets. Which they also view as service. So my employers continue to be generous with me now. Even though I’m retired, they consider me family.”
“Even though your son-in-law caused many of them to go to prison?” I say.
“The people in the organization that were sent to jail along with me were mostly lower level,” Nicholas says. “I took the hit for the upper management. They haven’t forgotten that. They won’t.”
“So you could ask them to spare Ethan? Theoretically? If you wanted to?”
“Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?” he says. “I have no desire to do that. Besides, I can’t pay off his debt. No one can.”
“You just said they’d do anything for you.”
“Maybe that’s what you wanted to hear,” he says. “What I said was they are generous with me about certain things. Not everything. Even families don’t let everything go.”
“No,” I say. “I guess they don’t.”
This is when I realize something else that is going on. I figure it out in what Nicholas isn’t owning—not yet, at least.
“You never liked Ethan, did you?” I say.
“Excuse me?” he says.
“Even before all of this, when you first met him, he wasn’t your choice. For your daughter. This poor kid from South Texas, wanting to marry your only daughter. That couldn’t have been what you wanted for her. He could have been you. He grew up in a town like the one you came from. He was a little too much like what you had organized your life to be better than.”
“Are you a therapist?”
“Not at all,” I say. “I just pay attention.”
He looks at me amused. Apparently he likes this. He likes me throwing his words back at him.
“So what are you asking me?” he says.
“Everything you did, you did so your children would have different choices than you did. Kate. Charlie. Easier choices. So they’d have a promising childhood. The best schools, the greatest possibilities. So they wouldn’t have to struggle so hard. And yet, one of your children drops out of architecture school and decides to take over your wife’s family bar. Gets divorced.”
“Careful,” he says.
“And the other one chooses someone who was the last person you’d want for her.”
“As my wife used to say, we don’t get to pick who our children love. I made my peace that she chose Ethan. I just wanted her to be happy.”
“But you had a feeling, didn’t you? He wasn’t the best person for Kate, he wasn’t going to make her happy.”
Nicholas leans forward, his smile gone.
“Did you know when Kate and Ethan started dating she didn’t speak to me for a year?”
“I didn’t even know Kate existed yesterday,” I say. “So the details as to how that relationship played out aren’t something I’m familiar with.”
“She was a freshman in college and she decided she didn’t want to have anything to do with us. With me, rather… her mother she never stopped talking to,” he says. “That was Ethan’s influence on her. We came through it though. Kate came home again and we made peace. That’s what daughters do. They love their fathers. And Ethan and I…”
“You came to trust him?” I say.
“I did. I clearly shouldn’t have,” he says. “But I did. I could tell you one story about your husband and you’d never see him the same way again.”
I stay quiet. Because I know Nicholas is telling the truth, at least the way he sees it. Owen, in his eyes, is bad. He has done bad things to Nicholas. He betrayed his trust. He stole his granddaughter. He disappeared.
Nicholas isn’t wrong about any of that. He may not even be wrong about me. If I choose to wade into the chasm of doubt Nicholas wants to create about Owen, it
