Eileen reached across my coffee table to put a hand on my knee. “Vicki, sweetheart, maybe you would have gone in and made them stop. You’re courageous enough, reckless enough. You’re truly your mother’s child that way. But you don’t have a family to support. Families are terrible hostages for men like your father. What other work could he get to support you and Gabriella where he knew your health and welfare would be taken care of? Your mother, God rest her soul, she wore herself out giving piano lessons to little girls for fifty cents a week. You couldn’t live on that. Tony did the best he could under very painful circumstances. He spoke up. Do you know how much courage that took?”

After she left, I took a long walk with the dogs, trying to digest Eileen’s words, trying to reconcile the idea of the father I loved so intensely with the man who’d been a cop, done a job, knowing he was working with men who committed torture.

I remembered the letter he wrote me when I graduated from the University of Chicago. It was still in my briefcase all these weeks later, waiting for me to get it framed. Back home, I pulled it out and reread it.

I wish I could say there’s nothing in my life I regret, but I’ve made some choices, too, that I have to live with. You’re starting out now with everything clean and shiny and waiting for you. I want it always to be that way for you.

After a time, I walked down to Armitage and gave the letter to a framing shop. We picked out a frame in green, my mother’s favorite color, with a gay pattern around the edge. I could read it and feel well loved. And know what he regretted, and mourn that. And try to realize that you never fully know anyone, that we, most of us, live with our contradictions. I, too, have my flaws, the hot temper he’d also warned me about in the letter, the temper that had frightened my cousin so much it almost cost her her life. Could I learn from that terrible mistake?

Of course, I wasn’t the only daughter trying to come to terms with a flawed father. My cousin had more serious issues to face than I did. At least Petra had her mother and sisters to help her try to cope with the shocks they’d all suffered during the last month. The day after our marathon night at police headquarters, Petra flew down to Kansas City to be with them.