Leonard emptied his tumbler, and then refilled it. Anthony did the same. Leonard Puckett regarded his son, unblinking. “You have no idea what it’s like, son.” Anthony couldn’t remember if there’d ever been a time in his life when his father had addressed him as son. No, he decided, there hadn’t been.

“You’ve made that clear,” he said. “I have no idea what it’s like to be as successful as you. I know that, Dad. I get it. I know I don’t have what you have.”

Leonard was looking down at his cup, and when he raised his head again his eyes were damp. Was Leonard Puckett . . . crying? “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “You understand, presumably, what it’s like to have your talent—your immense, your enviable talent—without the career. But you will never know what it’s like to have the career without the talent. To be merely a hack. To need your wife to do half the work because you simply can’t keep up with it yourself.”

It was the regret in Leonard’s voice that gnawed a pathway through to Anthony. Regret was such a painful and permanent thing. He felt a twinge of pity for his father. “You’ve written more books than any other writer in this store,” Anthony said, indicating with the wave of an arm the bookstore that lay beyond the storeroom. “In any store! You’re immortal.” Did he mean to say immortalized? He paused, uncertain, then let his decision stand.

“But the truth . . .” said Leonard. He hesitated. “What I mean to say is—the truth you got at, Anthony . . . In all of your writing, from the first work of yours I ever read, you had a way of getting at the truth. A way of just—grasping it. Piercing it. In all of my years of writing, I’ve never been able to do that, to get at the truth.” He sighed, and pressed his hands to his temples. “How I’ve envied you that, son—right along, how I’ve envied you. The quality of your writing, the masterfulness, the beauty, the insight. And you didn’t have to work for it.”

“Yes, I did. I worked for it.” His father was trying to negate Anthony’s blood, his sweat and tears, with a single furrow of his famous brow. “I worked like hell for it.”

“Not like I did,” said Leonard, shaking his head. “Not like I did.”

Why, then, did Anthony begin to feel a terrible sense of foreboding, as dark and heavy as a cloak laid about his shoulders? Then, so quietly that Anthony had to strain to hear him, Leonard said, “That’s why I did what I did.”

“What do you mean? What did you do?”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“Of what? Dad? Of what?”

Chapter 57

LU

LU DISMISSED MAGGIE, paid her, and went back up to the bedroom. She told Jeremy, “I need to go and think for a few minutes. You’re in charge of Chase and Sebastian.” She walked down to the beach.