Reg wiped the tear from his face with the back of his hand, jaw squared, eyes turning to ice. There would be no more crying, Quentin knew that much. He’d mentioned the elephant in the room about twenty minutes too early.

“That isn’t what I—”

“Have you ever wondered about Kate? Tell me, sir. Have you ever felt bad about ruining her life?”

“You are nothing but a sleazy, fake-news journalist.”

“Do you know what it’s like for a child to grow up, completely ignored by her own father?”

“I will not be ambushed.”

“Did you ever think about how that might affect her as a person, as a mother? Did you ever think about how it might make her treat her own son?”

“You said this was going to be about the Cooper and LeRoy murders,” Reg said. “That’s the only reason why I agreed to talk to you. You want to make this into some . . . some kind of family thing.”

“The Cooper and LeRoy murders are a family thing.”

Reg glared at the open laptop on the coffee table, the cardioid mic plugged into it, capturing every last word. “Turn that off,” he said.

“Kate was a victim. She not only lost her sister and her mother. She lost her father too. You. You were never there for your daughter, and it ruined her. Jesus, you blame April Cooper for just standing there while horrible things happened in front of her. What did you do during my mother’s entire life? You just fucking stood there.”

“Turn it off.” Reg lunged for the laptop, but Quentin was there first, unplugging the mic, closing the lid, slipping it back into its case.

“Get out of my house!”

Quentin gripped the case, his palms slick from sweat. He headed for the door and Reg followed him. “There is no podcast, is there?” Reg said. “Your mother put you up to this.”

Quentin turned. Stared him in the face. Reginald Banks Sharkey. His grandfather. He’d never laid eyes on him until today. And until today, he’d never realized how little he was missing. “We were both better off without you.”

Quentin headed out the door and into the late afternoon sunlight, the old man shouting at his back.

“YOU’RE HOME EARLY,” said Dean.

Quentin checked the time on his phone. “Yeah, I guess I am.” It didn’t feel early, though. In fact, the ride from San Bernardino to their South Pasadena bungalow had seemed to last a lifetime, with Reg Sharkey’s angry voice looping through Quentin’s brain, along with his own angrier one, that interview playing out over and over, to the point of where he was flipping around the radio—NPR first, then Howard Stern, alternative rock, ’80s punk, the Soulful Sixties Station, anything, everything—just to drown it out.

What had he done?