“We were about to file divorce papers. My father was going to testify on Sidra’s behalf. No big surprise—he always had a soft spot for Sidra, especially once she took over his dialysis. He thought I was doing all of these nutty things and then trying to make it look like she did them.”

“I see.”

“I guess when he died, she lost the one person in the family who believed in her.”

He looked out of the window, his mind a million miles away. I sipped my coffee, leaving him with the quiet of his thoughts, wondering if he was the murderer, if he had killed his own father.

“How does it all get so far offtrack?” he said finally, softly, more to himself than to me. I didn’t respond, and after a moment, he spoke again, his voice distant and lost.

“The first time I saw Sidra, she was sitting in the doorway of her mother’s hacienda, embroidering a shirt collar. She was so beautiful—and only 17. I was 20.”

“In Central America?” I asked. He nodded.

“I went there with my dad,” he said. “I liked going, liked the scenery and the culture. But I was changed after that trip. I wanted to get back. I wanted to get back to her.”

“You finished seminary first.”

“I’d always felt the call to be a missionary despite the fact that Dad wanted me to come into the business with him. Once I met Sidra, my mind was made up. I knew the Lord wanted me to be a missionary to Honduras. Sidra and I started writing, and we fell in love through our letters.”

After graduation, Derek explained, he worked things out with the mission board and headed south, where he and Sidra were soon married. They lived in her small village and built up a church and a school there.

Their life was fulfilling but not always easy. A devout Christian, Sidra was the perfect helpmate for Derek’s ministry. But as a woman of relative privilege who had been educated in Buenos Aires, Sidra found labor conditions in her homeland simply appalling. She often railed against the huge holes in the local labor laws that created sweatshops, holes that allowed children to work 12-hour days and women to spend seven days a week hunched over their sewing machines.

“She verbally attacked my father the first time they met, calling him a capitalist pig,” Derek said, smiling at the memory. “Once he got her to calm down, they had a real conversation. After that, Smythe Incorporated became a humanitarian leader in the clothing industry, a leader in eradicating poor labor practices. My father and Sidra found a common ground, and together they accomplished a lot. They even managed to have some laws made there.”

“Your wife strikes me as a very capable woman.”

To my surprise, tears suddenly filled Derek’s eyes.

“I seem to have lost sight of that lately,” he said.