Carrie still believes that Mike Keene was one of the best cops she’s ever seen, and not because he’s her dad. She’s met literally hundreds of people in law enforcement since she was a kid, and she can remember them all perfectly (of course). He loved the job. He was, as she once heard on her all-time favorite TV show, “natural police.” Witnesses talked to him. Even the angry drunks respected him. He knew the people on his beat. He knew when to punish them, and when to let them get away with it. He would have been a star in any department.

And she took that away from him. His whole career. His whole purpose in life.

It doesn’t help that he suspects Carrie has never told him the whole truth about what happened that night. He’s right, of course.

Before New Year’s Evil, they were more like partners than parent and daughter. They always had each other’s backs. He let her follow her hunches, and she delivered the bad guys to him. It drove her mother nuts. But her father would always forgive her if she bent or broke the rules, and she would always tell him where the clues took her.

Until everything exploded, too many people died, and it turned out she knew it was coming.

He said he did not blame her — said it so often, in fact, that it was like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. He was still trying to be on her side. Trying to be the reliable, faithful man she’d always known.

Once, however, that mask slipped. It was the day he’d had to turn in his badge, a completely unnecessary public humiliation that the mayor orchestrated for the local paper and the cameras of the TV stations. Mike was home and out of uniform when Carrie got back from school, the first time that had happened since she was in third grade, and he’d had to stay with her while she recovered from a tonsillectomy.

He sat at this kitchen table, a beer open in front of him, half-finished. He looked at her, and for a moment, neither of them said anything. There was genuine confusion in his eyes when he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”