I placed my phone back on my desk.

That night, I found Cricket at her computer. “My journal,” she said. “Be right with you.” She fussed over a single sentence, deleting, rewriting. Finally satisfied, she pressed save and swiveled her chair around to face me in the doorway.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

She pushed her glasses to the top of her head and pointed to her bed. “Sit.”

She was smiling, curious. Perhaps she assumed this was about Atlas. I drew a frilly pillow into my lap. “It’s bad, Cricket.” Her smile faded. I confided about the tuition, just as I’d practiced. I watched her expression fall into the routine, by now, we Richardson women knew as muscle memory. Confusion. Shock. Denial. Sadness.

“Why would he do this?” She stood, then dropped next to me on the bed.

“In typical fashion,” I said, “he abandoned us to figure that out on our own.”

Cricket, ignoring my cynicism, began to answer her own question. “He loved you more than you realized, Daisy. He just saw so much of himself in you. That’s why I think he was so hard on you, and, I suspect, that’s the reason he went to those lengths even if it put you in such jeopardy. Not to excuse him, but he must’ve wanted to help you, to remove an obstacle from your path. He thought he was doing this for good reasons.”

“If he thought his reasons were honorable, then why didn’t he tell you?”

“Because he knew he was wrong.”

My gaze drifted to the painting hanging over Cricket’s tufted headboard. One of Gregory’s favorites, it had once hung in his Senate office—a pure abstraction in oil, a red circle on the right, a shimmering white one on the left, both layered on a luminous yellow sky. Often I’d catch him staring at it, deep in thought. What had he seen? The red devil on one shoulder, the white angel on the other, both anxious to speak? I knew which had proven more persuasive. “I think the power got to him,” I said, turning back to Cricket.

“People aren’t corrupted by power, Daisy. Power just amplifies who they already are. As Gregory’s power grew, it made him that much more obstinate and difficult.”

“It was all about him, all the time.” I’d heard parents refer to their children as a reflection of themselves. But I was not a mirror to my father. Instead, I was one of his limbs, an extension of him and his public persona. He moved me through life as he wished.