Yet he found it impossible to completely dismiss the possibility, and the strength of purpose he had felt after swearing to banish the ghosts from his car was quickly flooding out of him in the aftermath of his meeting with Ben. There had been no great revelation, no release, only a quiet struggling that left him feeling weary and alone. They would talk, later, but he wondered if there was any point to that. Perhaps everything that was going to happen had happened, and now his friendship with Ben was over.

“Fuck!” he said, the purity and forcefulness of the profanity cleansing in its simplicity. Fuck. Odd, he thought, how the word considered the most unutterable should be the one that represented, for many, the greatest pleasure of which the human body was capable. The sacred and the profane, he supposed, the ultimate proof of the perversity of human nature, to make a curse of the very act that kept the species in existence.

He realized that he was distracting himself from thinking about Ben. He knew, too, that thinking about Ben was going to neither change nor improve the situation. He felt an intensifying of his anger toward Caddie—Caddie who, like some kind of snot-nosed Cassandra, made predictions of calamity and ruination.

Cassandra, a favorite of Paul’s. Cassandra, whose name meant “she who entangles men.” Cassandra, whose predictions of the future were met with disbelief, no matter how many times she was right. Had Caddie, like the cursed daughter of the king of Troy, brought about his destruction by speaking the truth? Was she merely a mouthpiece or was her role in the current drama more complicated than that? In her desire to have her father to herself, had she taken something small (however true it might be) and turned it into something else, something more certain to put distance between her father and her perceived rival? Even if her suspicions were correct, what was to say they would ultimately have amounted to anything? Had she just waited, Hudson would have left and any feelings he might have stirred in Ben would, in all likelihood, have dissipated.

But she had chosen to speak, and now her prophecy was growing in strength and could not be ignored. He and Ben would need to face it, tonight, and both would have to live with whatever havoc was wrought by having heard her words. Hudson could only hope that, unlike the revelations of Cassandra, this one might not be inescapable.