“He wants to control you, Theo. Your father and I have very different ideas about life, but the main one is this: I know I am a criminal. Your father believes he is a businessman. I have always kept my children far from my work. Your father, on the other hand, wants you to follow in his footsteps.”

“He convinced my family that I was a killer. Juliet believes it. Ursula. Caroline.” My voice choked on my wife’s name. No wonder she’d wanted to divorce me. Now that I finally understood the depths my father had sunk to, my brain could barely process all the consequences. Mirelle’s death had changed me; I never wanted to hurt anyone again, to be in a state where I could lose control. But it had also damaged every important relationship I had. I couldn’t fully trust anyone, ever.

“My sister should know better, after the life she’s had with your father,” Klaus said. “But Ursula stopped speaking with me long before this happened.”

“She once told me you forced her to move into my father’s house.” My brain was still spiraling around the implications of what my father had done, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance to understand this piece of family history. Ursula had been in my life as long as I could remember, even before my mother had walked out.

“I suppose I did. Ursula was young and shiftless, and your mother . . . well, she was always a character, and she had a rough time after you were born. Ursula was supposed to help out with you and your sister,” Klaus said. “I never imagined she would have an affair with your father. I certainly never told her to marry him. That was her own mistake.”

“She was the reason my mother left,” I said. “Juliet despises her for that.”

“You don’t?”

“Should I? Ursula took care of me from the time I was young. My mother left and never came back. If anyone was at fault for the affair, it was my father.” It was true that I blamed him for it. But now there was so much more that I had to condemn him for.

“He was older, but that did not make him wiser.”

“My father had you hire Mirelle to pretend to be my girlfriend. Then he killed her and made me think I was a monster,” I said. “He deserves all the blame. For everything.”

Klaus drank some wine. “I know it is a horrible shock, but I want you to understand it from your father’s perspective. He has only one son, and this precious boy was bent on self-destruction. Can you imagine the grief that would cause? The heartbreak?”

“Don’t tell me that my father gaslights me because he loves me.”

“I don’t think your father knows what love is,” Klaus says. “It’s why he tries to control you.”