"I won't sit here and listen to this." His voice drops. "Not at my table."
"How's Harold Devins?"
The room goes very still.
Harold Devins sat on the board of three Fortune 500 companies and played golf with my father once a month at the Pines. Four months ago, his housekeeper found him at his own dining table, everything in order, everything clean, except that his head sat on the serving plate where the main course should have been. The police released enough detail for the pattern to be obvious to anyone paying attention. My father knew Harold.
"Harold is dead." Frederick's voice has dropped, stripped of the act. "You know that."
"I do."
He pushes his plate forward, six inches, and presses his fingers against its edge until the blood leaves them. I watch him put it together: every headline, every victim profile, every map of crime scenes rearranged around his son who called two weeks ago and asked to come for dinner. For the first time in years.
"You're—" He can't finish the sentence. Tries again. "How long?"
"Six years."
"How many?"
I let the quiet sit between us. "Enough."
He pushes his chair back. Not far. There's nowhere to go, and the distance between his security and this room might as well be a continent. He's trying to create space. Trying to think. I've seen this before, in other dining rooms, at other tables: the momenta man stops thinking about whether he'll survive and starts thinking about what he can trade.
"There are people in this house, Jude." His eyes flick to the door. "Someone will hear."
"Let them."
"Jude, listen to me." His pitch has climbed, the words coming faster than his mouth can shape them properly. "I know things. About the family. About the estate. Things you'd want to protect."
"I don't need your money."
"Not the money." His throat bobs on a dry swallow. "I know things about your mother."
The word drops into my chest, where nothing else tonight has touched. I set my wine glass down. My fingers peel off the crystal one at a time.
Every man who sat across from me at a table like this one tried something near the end. They begged, mostly. A few tried threats. Hard to back those up from the wrong side of a dinner table. They all bargained. They offered money, information, other names, their own children. I've heard every card a dying man can play.
This one is new.
"What about her."
My father leans forward. He's reading my face the way I've been reading his, looking for the crack, the thing he can push. His chin lifts. His shoulders roll forward.
"The fall." His tongue sweeps his lower lip. "The one that killed your mother."
"Go on."
"It wasn't what they said." He stops and regroups. He places his next words the way a man places chips when the table is down to the last hand. "Kimberly and I, our marriage was complicated. You were deployed. You didn't see everything."
"I saw enough." My voice stays flat. Level. "She covered the bruises with makeup. She held her left arm different when her shoulder was bad. She met me at the airport in sunglasses. In December."
My father flinches. Not at the words but at the fact that I have them. Twenty years of hiding it, and he's been sitting across from the one person who never stopped watching.
"Would you let me finish."
"Tell me then."
"She fell." His mouth stays open after he says it, waiting for the rest of the sentence to save him. Nothing comes. His shoulders drop. "Fine, she didn't fall. I pushed her. She was at the top of the stairs and I pushed her and she didn't get back up."
