“Anyhow, by the time we got there, Benji was a changed kid. He knew he’d been rejected. He saw what it did to his mother. He started to hate anyone with money, or anyone who acted superior to him. I guess he associated them with the father he wasn’t good enough for. But that father was always in his head. As teenagers, we used to sneak into the bleachers at Fenway Park, the baseball stadium, and he’d look down at the people in the expensive seats and say, ‘Any one of those guys might be my deadbeat dad.’ Or we’d take the T line after school and ride out to Beacon Hill, the fancy neighborhood, and we’d smoke cigarettes and watch men coming home from work in their nice suits, and he’d say the same thing. ‘Might be that guy, Dobby. Or maybe that guy . . .’

“I told him to stop wasting his time. It wasn’t worth it. Don’t get me wrong. I had plenty of issues with the rich. But not like Benji.

“Then his mom got injured at the factory, and he quit school to take care of her. That was a raw deal. She did nothing wrong. A scaffold she was on collapsed, but that factory built a case against her so they wouldn’t have to pay lifetime health coverage. Imagine getting too injured to walk, and then being blamed for it. No wonder Benji was angry.

“I came back to visit them once. I was in the navy at that point, and Aunt Claire was in her wheelchair—it was the last time I saw her alive. Benji was still going on about why she was even working in that factory, and where was the father who should have been responsible for them? He said he’d go after the bastard himself if he ever knew who he was. But Claire took that secret to her grave.”

He paused. “Or so I thought.”

LeFleur looked up. “What?”

“My ma had moved back to Ireland. A few years later, she got cancer. I was with her one night, near the end, when she told me something she’d sworn to never tell anyone. She said that Benji’s father wasn’t only rich, but he’d become a pretty famous businessman. And that poor Claire had to read about him in the American newspapers.”

He hesitated. “And that his name was Jason.”

LeFleur blinked hard, his thoughts racing.

“Lambert?” he said.

“I have no idea. Whatever his last name was, my mother couldn’t remember it. She died a month later.”

“So how did Benji—”