“Shut the fuck up! You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all!”

“I guess that’s what comes of having no father,” Brent pressed on, not missing a beat. “Then again, that’s probably why he left in the first place. Maybe he saw the same thing in you all those years ago. Maybe that’s what drove him away. He figured it was hopeless and just took off.”

Jeremiah’s whole body clenched, and he grabbed Brent by the shirt collar and pulled him off the couch to his feet. Brent laughed. From this distance, Jeremiah could see his eyes were glassy and smelled the whiskey on his breath.

“And then you did the same exact thing,” Brent pushed. “You just took off. Walked out on your family the first chance you got. Don’t you see that? Don’t you get it? You can’t escape your own destiny. You were doomed from the start to repeat the same mistakes of your father. It’s a never-ending cycle and you can’t stop it. Your son will end up the same way: Weak. Pathetic. Hollow.”

Jeremiah couldn’t contain himself another minute. Before he even had time to think about his own actions, he pulled back his right arm, holding Brent’s shirt with his left, and punched him hard and square in the face. Brent’s head reeled to the left and he fell backward, hitting the back of his head on the arm of the couch, blood already coming out his nose, his mouth. And before he could get his balance back, Jeremiah hit him again, pulled him forward away from the couch and then pushed him back hard. He fell on the floor.

Brent shook his head and slowly got on his feet. He took two or three unsteady steps toward Jeremiah, looked him right in the eye, almost nose to nose with him now, and showed bloodstained teeth behind a deliberate, joyless smile.

“Diana probably crashed her car on purpose,” he snarled. “Just to be rid of you.”

Jeremiah stood still for another instant, his breath coming out in slow, shallow spurts. He pushed Brent back hard against the wall and burst past him into the kitchen. He grabbed a knife from the counter—only half recollecting in that moment that this had all been carefully planned—and then he went back and jabbed the thing three inches in and out of Brent’s left shoulder. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered how he’d remembered to put the knife into Brent in exactly the way they had rehearsed. Brent went silent. His face went slack and his eyes went wide and finally closed. Something in his expression seemed to relax and he fell slightly forward, right onto Jeremiah, and uttered a single word into his ear before falling limply to the floor.

“Sorry.”

It was enough to snap Jeremiah back into his senses. He looked down in dismay at his friend, who was slumped now at his feet, but still awake and perceptibly smiling, despite his injury.