He heard the door open behind him. Felt the draft of evening air. Then a voice.
"Ethan, right?"
Ethan turned and almost walked straight into a man standing behind him. Tall, early sixties, silver hair perfectly styled back from a face with pale blue eyes. He wore a dark suit, no tie, the top button of his shirt was open. He was wearing a smile that showed just a few too many teeth.
"Sorry. I wasn't looking."
"No harm done." The man smiled. "My daughter has told me a lot of good things about you. How's your father?"
That’s when Ethan placed him. It was Luther Ashford. Natalie's father. He'd seen him once before, at a distance, at some event in town.
"Ask your daughter," Ethan said, and moved toward a table with his drink.
He was pulling out a chair when Luther's voice followed him, unhurried, conversational, as if they were already in the middle of something.
"A terrible thing, the disappearance of your girlfriend. Fiona Spence, right? But it must give you confidence to know your father is looking into it."
Ethan stopped. "I guess."
He sat down. Luther ordered a drink at the counter, exchanged a few words with Lacey that Ethan couldn't hear, and then made his way over.
"May I join you?"
"Free country," Ethan said.
Luther smiled and slid into the booth across from him. He set his cup down and folded his hands around it. "So I hear your sister Mia is considering joining the FBI."
Ethan grunted into his drink.
Luther tore a sugar packet and tapped the contents into his coffee. He stirred it with a small wooden stick, slow and deliberate. "Are you planning to follow in your father's footsteps?"
"Hell no."
"Ah. A Sutherland that doesn't want to enter the law enforcement field. I expect that ruffled a few feathers."
Ethan shrugged. "Like I care."
Luther grinned. Not a smile. A grin. A grin that said he'd found something he liked. "I can respect that,” he said. "You want to forge your own way. The question is, what way would that be, Ethan?"
"I dunno."
"You're young. You have plenty of time to figure out what you want." Luther took a sip and set the cup down. "You know, I've always said that where you don't empower your life, someone else will disempower it."
Ethan looked at him. Something about the sentence landed. Not because it was deep. Because it was the first thing anyonehad said to him in weeks that wasn't about Fiona, or his father, or what he was supposed to be doing with himself.
"You like that?" Luther asked.
"Yeah. I guess."
Luther looked around the café for a second. The couple in the corner. The old man with his book. Lacey restocking napkin dispensers. He turned back to Ethan.
"Growing up, my father always wanted me to become a high court judge. Because that's what his father did before him. A family tradition. A legacy."
"You never wanted to do it?"
"It's an admirable profession. However, it has its limitations. Your hands are restrained by the legal system. A system made up by men to govern other men." He paused. "I mean, who decides what is right and wrong? Good and bad?"
"Well, if it didn't exist, we'd have chaos."
