Something tells me Sidney Ewen doesn’t have many days left on this earth. Perhaps that is why he agreed to see me. To rid himself of the mountainous guilt weighing so heavily on his stoop.

“Small batch?” my father inquires.

“Indeed,” Ewen says, taking another sip. He spends the next minute telling my father about an old acquaintance’s distillery in northeastern Scotland and the peat that grows there.

My dad offers me the glass and I take a sip.

It is marvelous, but all I can think about is how I have two less minutes, two less questions I can ask.

“But we did not come here to talk of scotch,” Ewen says, moving his eyes from my father to me. “Let us begin.”

“Where did you meet my mother?” I ask.

He takes a deep breath.

“I met Elena when she was twenty-three years old, when she was at Camp Perry, or what many people call ‘The Farm.’ This would be 1970 or ‘71. Each year, I would give a lecture to the new recruits on the latest breakthroughs in enhanced interrogation.”

“Torture,” I say.

“Yes, torture.”

“And at this time you were heading up MK-Ultra?”

“I was. I’d been appointed by my dear friend Allen a decade earlier, but by 1971 the Senate was breathing fire down our necks. Two years later and Allen would officially pull the plug on the program.”

“You talk about the program as if you were building houses for refugees in Haiti and not experimenting on unwilling American citizens in various forms of behavior modification.”

“I understand you think me a monster, and I have neither the energy nor the time on this earth to argue otherwise. I did what I did.”

He doesn’t say this with indignation. He does, however, say it without the slightest air of remorse. To him, the people he experimented on were a casualty of war, no different than a man in the trenches.

Only the man in the trenches has a choice.

I want to scream at him that I was a casualty of this war.

I take two calming breaths, then say, “You were giving a lecture in Camp Perry in 1971 . . .”

“Yes, yes. I was speaking, as you might expect, about some of the findings from the program’s many projects, and Elena, well, let’s just say, she stood out among the crowd.”

“In what way?”

“Well, as you might know, and your father can certainly attest to, your mother was a beautiful woman. A rose among thorns. Those eyes.”

Yes, those eyes.

They haunted my dreams.

“But it was not her looks that intrigued me,” he continues. “It was her insight. I’ll never forget what she said near the end of my lecture. I was talking about how fear is your most powerful tool in interrogation when Elena raised her hand and said that she disagreed. She said your most powerful tool is hope.”

“Hope?”