“Those letters. They were given to me when Everett handed over the deed to our home. I didn’t know it until he was gone. How much do you know about the brother?”

“Not much. He rarely spoke of him. When he was mentioned, it was in connection with Vincent’s childhood, which was pathetically lonely—he says that wasn’t one of the many lies he told.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“I honestly don’t know what to believe anymore. As for Albert, they weren’t close except for a very brief time when they were young. Albert was their parents’ favorite, you see. He went everywhere with them, while Vincent was never included. I gather that Vincent was in the habit of cleaning up his brother’s calamities, though, a brotherly duty, as he saw it. Mind you, everything I just told you came directly from Vincent, a known liar.”

He ignored the bitter tone, said, “You’ll find those letters enlightening, then.”

She stared at her father, waited for further explanation. He gave none, merely nodded at the letters now in her hand. She read them, both. They were Albert Everett’s letters to Vincent. She had to read the first one again to make sense of it, then once more.

Finally she said, “This first one does paint a rather dastardly picture of you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, from a child crying foul. And Albert even admits it in the second letter, that he hadn’t grown up yet, at least not to a point where he would take responsibility for his own actions.”

“You would think that Vincent would have suspected as much.”

“When, as you say, he didn’t really have much association with his brother?”

“You’re defending him?” she asked incredulously.

“No, just trying to see this mess from his perspective—and well aware that given the same set of circumstances in my own family, I probably would have acted exactly as he did. Actually, I may well have acted much worse and have called the man out who had so ruined a member of my family that he chose to kill himself.”

“But revenge is pointless. You’ve always said so. You’ve raised us to believe the same.”

“Revenge is, yes, and particularly when you don’t have the means to inflict it. But when you have a victim driven to the point of death, and the one responsible escapes without any consequence whatsoever, then it’s a matter of trying to visit justice on the guilty one.”

“You really are defending him.”

George chuckled. “No, because we don’t really have all the facts and never will have them. Even Albert admits he was drinking heavily most of the time that the events occurred, so wouldn’t remember exactly what brought him low. Lord Everett is guilty of drawing his own conclusions. But given the known facts, his conclusions were hard to dispute.”