Chapter 14: What Harlan Offered

Sam's POV

My father's study still had the same green lamp, and he still poured the whisky before he said why he'd called me.

I stood in the doorway in my work boots and didn't take the glass.

"Eight years," Harlan said. "You walked out of this room with your brother's blood on your knuckles."

"He took five hundred thousand dollars to a woman I was going to marry."

"I know. I wrote the check."

He said it flatly, without looking away.

I had known it for eight years, and I had never heard him say it out loud.

"She took it in an afternoon," he said. "That told you what she was, and it told me too."

"It told me what you were."

"Sit down, Samuel."

I stayed where I was.

He lowered himself into the leather chair and set his cane across his knees.

Then he slid a folded letter across the desk with one finger.

I read it standing.

It was from a cardiologist, two pages, and I got as far as the word inoperable and stopped.

"A year," my father said. "The doctor says perhaps less."

"The clause."

"I wanted to see a grandchild in this house before I was done. And I wanted the firm in the hands of a man who would give me one."

"So you had your sons race for it."

"You left the race."

"I wasn't a runner. I was a prize you used to hurt me with."

My father didn't flinch.

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