“I was a screwup.”

“No, you weren’t. You were a work-in-progress.”

“Really rough work. I couldn’t wait to get through—to get through high school, to get through my eighteenth birthday. To get through so I could get out. That’s what I did, on my eighteenth birthday. I packed up and headed down to D.C. Had about five hundred dollars, no job, no nothing. But I was out of there.”

“And you made it work.”

“I lived by the skin of my teeth for three years. Working construction, blowing my pay on beer and…fancy women,” he said with a sudden grin. “Then I was twenty-one, broke, careless, stupid. And I met Connie. I was on the crew doing some work on her parents’ guest house. I hit on her, and much to my surprise we started seeing each other.”

“Why to your surprise?”

“She was a college girl—conservative daughter of a conservative family. She had money and class, education, style. I was the next step up from a bum.”

She studied him. Strong face, she thought. Strong hands. Strong mind. “Obviously she didn’t think so.”

“No, she didn’t. She was the first person who ever told me I had potential. Who ever believed in me. She made me believe in myself, made me want to, so I could be what she saw when she looked at me. I stopped screwing up, and I started to grow up. You don’t want to hear this.”

“Yes, I do.” To keep him talking, she topped off his wine. “Did she help you start your business?”

“That came later.” He’d never talked about this with anyone, Brody realized. Not his parents, not his friends, not even Jack. “I was good with my hands, and I had a good eye for building. I had a strong back. I’d just never put them all to use at the same time. Then I figured out I liked myself a whole lot better when I did.”

“Of course, because then you respected yourself.”

“Yeah.” Nail on the head, he thought. Did she ever miss? “Still, I was skilled labor, not a doctor or a lawyer or a business exec. Her parents objected to me—strongly.”

She toyed with her potatoes, much more interested in what he told her than in the meal. “Then they were short-sighted. Connie wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t easy for her to buck them, but she did. She was going to Georgetown, studying law. I was working full days and going to school at night, taking business classes. We started making plans. Couple of years down the road, we’d get married. She’d stay in school till she passed the bar, then I’d start my own business. Then she got pregnant.”

He studied his wineglass, turned it around and around, but didn’t lift it to drink. “We both wanted the baby. She more than me at first, because the whole thing didn’t seem real to me. We got married. She kept up with her studies, and I took some extra jobs. Her parents were furious. This was what she got for throwing herself away on somebody like me. They cut her off, and that twisted her up pretty bad.”