But from time to time, Jeff’s concentration would drift as it did today during the meeting on the status of engaging the international news media. Jeff was looking at the damaged skin on his knuckles, thinking about how close he’d come to losing it and killing Loften.

I wanted him dead.

A thunderclap of realization forced Jeff to flinch as his rage and the guilt that had consumed him for so many years boiled inside, compelling him to admit what he was and would always be.

The truth that had tormented him much of his life had broken free.

Again.

“So what do you think, Jeff?”

Someone had said his name. He heard more words but was lost. “Pardon me?”

“I was saying we’ve also spoken to the international desks at the BBC, CNN and the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. They all expressed interest in sending news teams to see Globo Aedifico’s new sanitation systems and clean-water projects in development in the remote regions and—” Carlotta Diaz interrupted herself to stare at him. “Jeff, are you all right? You look pale.”

“I’m sorry, Carlotta. I’m not feeling well.” Jeff got up. “Excuse me.”

He left the meeting and went to the washroom, leaned over the sink and ran the water until it was cold, cold like it was that morning he was hunting with his father and Charlie. Remembering now kneeling over his dad…

…bleeding on the ground…his dad’s face ashen…eyes burning with surprise and sadness in the cold of the marshy riverbank…where his father lay dying…the brilliant red of the blood…

Coloring his world, scarring him, changing him forever.

It left him without a dad, forever.

Suddenly, he was pierced with the memory of the time he’d found a measure of happiness when he’d joined the Boy Scouts. But within weeks, the Scouts had planned a father–son event. His mother, mildly drunk at the time, had suggested that one of her new drug-addict boyfriends stand in with Jeff for the event. God, how Jeff roiled with pain he couldn’t contain.

“He’s not my father, he’s your customer,” he’d spat at her.

Her palm on his face stung.

He quit Scouts and, after lying about his age, got a job cleaning shoes in a bowling alley.

His father’s death was a tragedy he could never escape. It had broken his mother, annihilated her will, forcing her to do the vile things she did for money so they could survive. And he’d seen her taking drugs, drinking herself into a stupor. He’d seen her with men, seen what she did on her knees and on her back, and he burned with shame, anger and guilt.

Guilt because it was his fault she had become what she had.