Malcolm had nodded. He knew that people always regretted not having spent enough time with the dead person before they passed; he had felt this briefly about his own father, and he’d hated the man.

“She asked if she and the children could come and stay for a while,” Jill went on. “A holiday, she said. I was about to tell her there wasn’t room. We weren’t close anymore. But there was something in her voice.”

This was the part that had stayed with Malcolm over the years: something in her voice.

It probably meant nothing. People invented all kinds of things to torment themselves after a death. Katrina didn’t seem to have pursued the idea, anyway. The next Jill had heard of her sister was a distraught phone call from Heather several weeks later, and then the lurid media reports. (Malcolm and Heather had kept Tommy away from all that, at least. That was one thing they had done right.)

“You never spoke to Heather like that,” Tommy said now, breaking into his thoughts. “The way my father spoke to my mother. Unkindly, I mean.”

“No.” God, he hoped not.

“So why did my father treat his wife like that and you didn’t?”

“We weren’t the same person,” Malcolm said, hearing how defensive he sounded.

“I just don’t understand,” Tommy said, “how he ended up one way and you ended up another. He can’t have been born bad. Can he?”

Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t know.” It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t sound likely, though. Babies were babies, weren’t they? Children were children.

“What was your father like?” Tommy said.

Malcolm sighed. He thought carefully and said, “He was unhappy. He didn’t like our mother, and I’m not sure he liked us much either. Me and John.” He hesitated. “He was a bit of a bastard, truth be told.”

Tommy said, “So you see, then. It gets passed on.”

“Aye, maybe.”

Malcolm caught Tommy’s stricken expression for just a moment before Tommy could hide it, and realized, belatedly, what his nephew had been attempting to ask him. Why was he so slow today? Trying to match Tommy’s indirectness with his own, he said, “I don’t believe I am like my father. That’s not always the way it goes. I don’t believe we’re doomed to become our parents.”

“No?”

“It’s not genetic,” Malcolm said, “the kind of –” he paused, searching for a suitably vague word—“attitude your father had, the attitude my father had. Maybe you learn it. Maybe John learned it. But it isn’t inevitable.”

Tommy didn’t speak for a few moments. Then he shrugged, and drained his mug. “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I think I’ll go up.” He produced what might have been an attempt at a smile. “All that chamomile. Making me tired.”