“Oh.” Good fucking riddance. But Father Dennis had been Victor’s friend for years. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Victor sighed. “He regretted it, you know. He always felt he drove you away from the Church.”

“Well, yeah. He totally did. He meant to.”

“No, Ángel. He knew he shouldn’t have told me about you,” said Victor. “That was wrong. But he believed you could choose another path. He thought we could help you.”

“Papá. I know you liked him, and I don’t want to fight with you. But he was not trying to help me. If he’d known the word, he’d have called me a cherna to my face.”

Victor winced. Not a big fan of the gay, he also deplored name-calling. “Sometimes,” he said, “people are helping you, and it looks like something else. If you look at it from their point of view you can see.”

“Sure.”

Victor sighed, nodded. “I know. And sometimes people are wrong, and they regret it, and they wish they could make it up to you.”

Ángel disagreed, but he didn’t want to wrangle about this with Victor. This was the longest conversation he’d had with his father in years, after all. Why ruin it?

“I was wrong to send you there,” said Victor.

Ángel studied his father. Victor had rarely, if ever, admitted fault before. But he seemed different now, less hard. He was thinner too, and browner; maybe he’d been spending more time in the sun, since he’d lost his business. “Was it Mom?” he asked. “The Ponzi scheme?”

“Your mom and Bill. They used my name. I didn’t know about it at first, not until it was big.” Victor paused. “I couldn’t let her go to prison.”

Ángel snorted softly. “I notice she’s not here.”

“No, she—she was embarrassed. By the publicity. You know.”

“Yeah, Papá. I know.” She had already been embarrassed by him—and that was before he’d gotten a reputation for being an elf-fucker. Victor was here, though. No doubt he was embarrassed by the publicity too; not to mention that he’d taken the fall for something he hadn’t done. But here he was. “I’m glad you came.”

“I’m glad you called me,” said Victor. “I knew I was wrong the minute you signed that contract. I was scared, and the DOR made it seem like the best thing. But then I saw you were so angry. I knew you’d never forgive me. I tried to make it right. I wrote him—Oberon—I wrote and apologized to him. I asked him to let me take your place. He . . . he said he was happy to have you there. But I knew it was wrong, Ángel. I’m sorry.”