“She hooked up with Lado when I was about sixteen. I hated the son of a bitch. I always figured she picked him because he was the opposite of the old man. He was sloppy and mean and jealous. Gave her lots of attention,” Michael muttered, and his eyes were dark with memory. “Lots of it. He used to knock her around.”

“God! He hit her?”

“She always denied it. I’d come home and she’d have a black eye or a split lip and make up some lame excuse about tripping or walking into a door. I let it go.”

“You were just a child.”

“No, I wasn’t.” His eyes, stormy now, latched onto hers. “I was never a child. By the time I was sixteen, I’d already seen and done more than you will in your lifetime, sugar. It suited me fine.”

“Did it?” She kept her eyes level. “Or did it keep you from feeling helpless?”

He nodded. “Maybe both. But the fact is, Mrs. Sullivan always had the right idea. I was a bad companion, and if Josh hadn’t been who and what he was, we both would have ended up in juvie. Or worse. Fact is, he’s the reason I didn’t.”

“I’m sure he’d appreciate the testimony, but I’d think you had something to do with that yourself.”

For the first time in months he had a strong, nagging urge for tobacco, even patted his pocket before remembering that that part of his life was over. “You know why I took the hitch with the merchant marine?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. One night I came home. Been drinking a little, me and Josh and a couple of others down at the cliffs. We were eighteen and stupid, and I’d copped a six-pack from Lado. So I walked into the house, feeling a nice comfy buzz, and there he was, that big fat bastard, using his fists on my mother because she hadn’t kept his supper warm or some such shit. I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, figured it was my job to look out for her. So I took him on.”

Absently, he brushed a finger over the scar above his eye. Laura’s glance flickered at the movement, then held steady.

“He outweighed me, but I was young and fast, and I’d already had my share of dirty fights. I beat the hell out of him. And I kept beating the hell out of him even when he was down and bleeding and unconscious and I couldn’t feel my own hands pounding into his face. I’d have killed him, Laura, that’s a fact. I’d have beat him until he was dead and I wouldn’t have looked back.”

She couldn’t envision it, wasn’t equipped to. But she thought she could understand it. “You were protecting your mother.”