Then her voice washed all guilt away. “How dare you!” She raised her fist and brought it slicing through the air, making contact with nothing. No hurt to be found, at least none I could hear. I’d never seen her so angry. Not even when I lost my inheritance. She took a step toward me, stopped by the coffee table. “This is what you do with your life? This is what you rejected our plans for? You turn down our fortune. You drop out of college. You shit all over it claiming your passion was art. Which was stupid enough. But this? You did all of this so you could be a common whore? After all you could be! With the Morgan name and money at your back. This is it? You threw it all away so you could be a slut? A prostitute?”
I stared at her, stunned. Mouth agape. I’d never heard her curse. And we’d had our share of screaming matches, the whole family. But nothing like this. She was unhinged. She looked feral.
Dustin’s mutter wasn’t loud enough to classify as a whisper, but in the silence, it was crystal clear. “Like mother, like son.”
“I said enough!” Dad backhanded Dustin—his hand, which was on Dustin’s leg, smashing into Dustin’s nose.
Mom screamed, blocking out any sound Dustin made.
Dad moved faster than I’d seen him do in years. One minute he was sitting, and the next he was standing over Dustin; he pulled his hand back and slapped Dustin’s face.
Dustin let out a cry of pain and pushed himself off the couch, shoving Dad out of the way as he stood. Blood flowed from his nose.
Dad stumbled back a step or two but caught himself, barely missing the corner of the teak table.
Taking a step toward him, Dustin lifted his fist, preparing to retaliate. I rose to stop him. As strong as Dad was, at his age, Dustin could easily kill him. Accidentally or not.
Before I could move, Dad flung his arms out wide. “Do it, Dustin. Do it! Hit me. You’ll lose everything. All the money. Your future political career. All of it. Hit me. At least you’ll be your own man for once.”
Dustin moved, his fist closing the distance toward Dad’s face by a couple of inches, and then he stopped, as surely as if he had hit an invisible wall. He stood that way, fist trembling in midair, glaring at our father with hate I’d never seen from him before. Then his arm went limp, fist still clenched but powerless at his side. He wiped at the blood with his sleeve and turned to walk toward the hall.
The three of us stood there, watching him. Then Dad spoke. “Come back, Dustin.”
Dustin paused, fist still clenched. He didn’t turn around.
Dad’s tone didn’t lose its superiority, but it gained a hint of pleasure, as if he were enjoying this. “I said come back.”
Again I wasn’t sure what Dustin was going to do.
There was a moment of silence, and then Dustin turned and slowly walked back to where he’d stood in front of our father seconds before.
“Good.” A small smile of triumph crossed Dad’s lips, and I understood my brother’s life more clearly than I ever had before. “Now sit.”
“Vincent, no!” Mom’s voice rose again. “The blood. There’s no way we’ll get it out of the couch.”
“Shut up.” Dad didn’t look at her, but kept his gaze trained on Dustin. “Sit.”
Dustin sat. He didn’t look at anything. Not Dad. Not me. He just interlocked his fingers and sat.
“Good boy.” Dad turned back to Mom. “You sit as well, Maureen. And no more hysterics.”
Mom didn’t meet my eyes either as she returned to her place on the sofa, though her whole body trembled. Out of anger or fear, I couldn’t tell. Didn’t much care at the moment, as horrible as that sounded.
Apparently satisfied, Dad turned and sat between them once more, smoothing his slacks as he did so. He returned his attention to me. “You can see the drama you’re causing.”
I took a note out of Dustin’s page and remembered my place. Or at least how much I had to lose. “I didn’t do anything to hurt this family. Not intentionally. And I am truly sorry that somehow your story got dragged back into it all.” That much was true. Even in my most dramatic imagining of the worst moments, I’d not foreseen that.
Dad swiped his left hand through the air. Dustin flinched. “I don’t need or want your apologies. I’ve always told you those do no good. They are cheap and ineffective. I need you to fix this. You caused it. You fix it.”
Maybe my synapses weren’t firing, or I was still too much in shock over all that just happened, but I had no idea what he was talking about. “Dad, I would if I could. I doubt you believe me, but it’s true. I don’t want any of you hurt because of my choices. But I don’t see how to fix it. It’s already done. Everything they’ve said about us—” I sucked in a breath, realizing what I’d just said. “—about me is true. It’s not like I can deny it. There would be too much proof. I bet if the paper paid enough, they could get more people to corroborate the story.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “That’s not how you fix it. You’re right. It’s too late for any of that. It’d been too late as soon as you chose to go down this road.”
“Okay. I’m sorry, but I don’t see what you want me to do.”
“You issue an apology. Publicly. As much as I hate those, I don’t see another option. You make a statement about the claims being true, and you apologize for any harm you caused your family and the public.”
“How did I cause harm to the public? I don’t see—”
