He followed her into the dining room; the others trailed along behind.

Jack called his father into the office and, once he’d closed the door behind him, lit a cigarette, and took a deep, comforting drag.

There was a time, when Jack was a teenager, that he had hated his father, had argued with every last one of his ridiculous pronouncements. The two of them had been like enraged bucks, snorting, pawing at the ground, antlers clashing.

Chase, in his quiet way, used to laugh at Jack, and tell him there was no way he was ever going to win. “Someday, I will,” Jack had vowed.

But when he got back from the war, Jack didn’t care anymore. He reserved his limited energy for the things that mattered: loving his wife, bringing up his kids. Now he had worked for his father for more than twenty-five years, and had let him have his way on everything. John was the boss, after all; besides, Jack was filled to his teeth with apathy about the bank, business, money in general. After what he’d seen in the war, it was hard to believe that money mattered at all.

At the same time, though, Mary and the kids needed clothes, food, a roof over their heads. They liked to be able to go to the movies, to go out for rides in the car. So Jack had provided them those things. It had all been a compromise, he was realizing. Twenty-six years of bending over and taking it. His father’s selfishness had infiltrated his life to the point where he didn’t even realize it anymore; perhaps it had become his own. It was likely everyone in town believed that when John died, Jack would move into the big house on the hill and be just the same. They did not know the truth of him at all, and it was Jack’s own fault for having kept himself hidden in the shadow of his father all these years.

It was one thing to compromise himself, he thought, but he’d be damned if his father was going to run amuck in his daughter’s life, too.

“What the hell is going on, Dad?” he said. “You lied to us. You lied to Lissa.”

“I did the right thing,” John snapped.

“How do you figure, Dad? Was it the fact you broke her heart then? Or the fact that now she’s got two boys fighting over her and she’s got to decide and break one of their hearts?” Jack tapped the dead ash from his cigarette into the ashtray on the desk. “It wasn’t fair to those boys, what you did, and it wasn’t fair to Liss. This is your fuck-up, Dad. You need to fix it.”

John glared at Jack, his hands on his hips. “I tell you how we fix it, Jack. We get rid of that Nick.”