I started drinking gin as soon as I got home from the jail. I had no limes, but it didn’t matter. I had tonic. I ran out a half hour ago, having spent the hours until sundown padding through my Washington Street house wondering exactly when everything started going off the tracks for our family. Until three months ago, the Cages had a pretty blessed run. Excluding the death of Annie’s mother, of course. But on balance, we’d been far more lucky than not.

Now it’s all gone to hell. Caitlin dead. Dad in prison. Mom in the hospital. Annie in protective custody a hundred miles away. Friends dead—some because of what they did to try to help us. Henry Sexton, Walt Garrity, even Viola. Lincoln Turner poisoned by lies and hatred. And yet, as my mother pointed out . . . Snake Knox still roams free.

As I drank away the afternoon, a single line spoken by my father in Judge Elder’s chambers kept repeating in my head: I hope you never do the things you’d have to do to be able to understand what I’m doing now. When I wasn’t pondering this, I was sifting through the information my parents had given me about the night Viola died. Once I knew my mother’s role, of course, all that had followed seemed simple enough to understand, and maybe even inevitable.

But no matter how much gin I consumed, I couldn’t rid myself of the image of my father’s face behind the wire screen, revealing that Viola had asked him to leave us after all, her heartrending plea carried in two desperate words: Save me. Given Viola’s pride, Dad would have known what it cost his old lover to beg him for deliverance. What had it cost him to hear her plea and then ignore it? To give up Viola for my mother, Jenny, and me? By the old standards of honor and loyalty, he did the right thing. But for himself, and for Viola . . .

Lincoln was right when he said that in some ways what our father had done to his mother was worse than killing her. Dad gave Viola a glimpse of another world, a better world in almost every way, and then took it away, condemning her to a half-life in exile from her home, with a man who did not love her. It was Viola who ended the affair, but only because she realized first how impossible any future together had been. Dad had the luxury of self-delusion; she didn’t.

In the end only one thing matters: he chose to stay with us.