The consequences of feeding it, however? Not worth it, she was coming to believe.

Her father took out a monogrammed handkerchief and dried his eyes. “I told Jeremiah—the man who had come to see me—that I couldn’t disappear from life altogether, but that I was interested in something, anything else. That’s how it started. Eventually, I was regularly going on intelligence missions overseas and our law firm gave me leeway because I was the founder’s grandson. I never knew the full scope of the assignments I was given as an operative . . . but from newspapers and television, I was aware that there were consequences. That actions were taken against certain individuals—”

“You mean murders,” she cut in bitterly.

“Assassinations.”

“Like there’s a difference?”

“There is.” Her father nodded. “Murders are purposeless.”

“The result is the same.”

When he didn’t say anything else, she was so not willing to have the story end there. “What about Daniel.”

Her father exhaled long and slow. “About seven or eight years into it, it dawned on me that I was a part of something I couldn’t live with. The phone calls, the people coming to the house, the trips that would last for days, weeks . . . to say nothing of the consequences of my actions. I stopped being able to sleep or concentrate. And God, the toll on your mother had been tremendous and it impacted the two of you as well—you were both young then, but you recognized the tensions and the absences. I started trying to get out.” Her father’s eyes flipped to Isaac. “That’s when I discovered . . . that you don’t get out. Looking back on it, I was naive . . . so damned naive. I should have known better, given what I’d been asked to do, but I’d gotten caught up in it all. Still, I had no choice. It was killing your mother . . . she was drinking heavily. And then Daniel started . . .”

Doing drugs, Grier finished in her mind. It had begun in middle school for him. First booze, then pot . . . then LSD and ’shrooms. And then the hard-core contact sport of cocaine, followed by the mellow morgue feeder that was heroin.

Her father refolded his handkerchief with precision. “When my initial overtures about leaving were met with a resounding ‘no,’ I became paranoid that on one of my assignments they were going to kill me and make it look like an accident. I stayed silent for years. But then I learned something I shouldn’t have, something that was a game changer for an important man of power. I tried . . . I tried to use it as a key to unlock the door.”

“And . . .” she interjected, her heart was pounding so loudly she wondered if the neighbors could hear it.

Silence.

“Go on,” she prompted.

He just shook his head.