There’s no sugarcoating it. Joe and I had a shitty childhood, which Joe is using as an excuse for his behavior. That’s one of the many things that makes the memoir, and the court case, so complicated. It was a terrible way to grow up. It doesn’t excuse the fact that he murdered Rhys, and he would have murdered me. But it was awful. Worse than I wanted to admit to Mateo, who had a happy family with a bunch of sisters and a large brood of aunts and uncles and cousins. He couldn’t possibly understand the solitary life we led.

No one is going to understand. Not unless I stop thinking and write.

My father was not a good boss.

In fact, he was a terrible one. This wasn’t a secret in the small town where I lived with my brother. Everyone knew that Jethro Macom was an asshole.

According to local lore, he’d been an asshole since the day he started working at a canning company in Connecticut. He was sixteen at the time and swept the floors between shifts. When he graduated, he moved up to a position on the production line. When I turned fifteen he got fired from his job. It was framed as a layoff, but everyone knew the truth. Everyone heard the rumors. We moved to Maine, where he got a job in Eben Cape.

Plenty of people worked at the factory with only a high school diploma to their names, but not many of them had my father’s track record.

The joke was that Jethro couldn’t go six months without getting written up. People would place bets on it. Even when he attained a position of power that let him write other people up for workplace infractions, he didn’t stop committing his own. Intimidating other employees. Shouting. Hitting. Sexual harassment.

Over the years, I’ve come up with many reasons why Eben Cape Canning Co. kept employing my father. The first was the six-month timeline. He always allowed time to pass between his outbursts. The second was the boom-bust nature of operating a factory in a place like Eben Cape. Everyone knows you have to keep the people you have, otherwise you might end up short-handed when it counts. The third is that my father was obviously volatile. Firing him might have caused more problems for the owners of the factory than keeping him on.

For all those reasons, I can understand—though I don’t agree with the decision—how my father was able to keep his job.

What I can’t understand is why no one thought to ask after his children.

A factory, by definition, is a fairly public place. No one in Eben Cape had any illusions about what kind of man my father was. He shouted in public. He hit people in public. He sexually harassed his employees. Maybe even worse, behind closed doors.