“Did you know this judge had shifted the Texas court sharply to the left and was imminently set to cast the deciding vote against a large energy corporation, the second largest in the country? If you want to talk about real criminals, these gentlemen were dispelling highly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at a clip that could make your eyes swell shut.”

He watches me.

“My point is that this judge, Kate’s boss, was writing a majority opinion against the corporation. It would lead to sweeping reform and cost the energy corporation close to six billion dollars in improved conservation efforts. And the day after my daughter was killed, the judge came home to a bullet in his mailbox. What does that sound like to you? A coincidence? Or a warning shot?”

“I don’t know enough,” I say.

“Well, Ethan decided he knew enough. He couldn’t be reasoned with that the men I had spent two decades protecting wouldn’t do that to my daughter. That I knew these men and they had their own code of honor. That wasn’t how they did things. Even their most nefarious colleagues didn’t do things like that unprompted. But Ethan didn’t want to believe it. He just wanted to blame me. And he wanted to punish me. As if I wasn’t punished enough.” He pauses. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.”

“I understand that,” I say.

“Your husband didn’t. That was the part he could never understand about me,” he says. “After his testimony, I spent six and a half years in prison as opposed to putting my family at risk by sharing my employer’s secrets. Which they also view as service. So my employers continue to be generous with me now. Even though I’m retired, they consider me family.”

“Even though your son-in-law caused many of them to go to prison?” I say.

“The people in the organization that were sent to jail along with me were mostly lower level,” Nicholas says. “I took the hit for the upper management. They haven’t forgotten that. They won’t.”

“So you could ask them to spare Ethan? Theoretically? If you wanted to?”

“Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you?” he says. “I have no desire to do that. Besides, I can’t pay off his debt. No one can.”

“You just said they’d do anything for you.”

“Maybe that’s what you wanted to hear,” he says. “What I said was they are generous with me about certain things. Not everything. Even families don’t let everything go.”

“No,” I say. “I guess they don’t.”

This is when I realize something else that is going on. I figure it out in what Nicholas isn’t owning—not yet, at least.

“You never liked Ethan, did you?” I say.