Not contrition, something harder. Fury. I raised my receiver. "Hello, Declan," I said.
He offered nothing in return. He leaned toward the glass until his breath clouded it. Are you satisfied? The voice that reached me through the phone was compressed, distorted. I met his eyes without moving.
I am not satisfied, Declan. No father takes any satisfaction in his son ending up in a place like this. Then what was the point? The edge in his voice came through the line undiluted. Why not accept the plea?
Why put yourself on that stand? You could have argued for a lighter sentence. You could have told them I hadn't thought it through. Instead, you sat there and watched them put me away. I listened to all of it and noticed something unexpected happening in the quiet of my own chest.
For months I had carried anger and grief and the bitterness of betrayal, stacked and dense and always present. Now with only a pane of glass between us, there was nothing. The bond between parent and child, the thing I had always assumed was beyond breaking had at some point quietly snapped. I was looking at a man I did not recognize. He wore my features.
He shared my blood, but everything I had ever stood for was absent from him entirely. I went through with it because you violated the law, Declan, I told him. Because what you intended was to make me disappear. This was never only about the money. You wanted me gone warehoused somewhere out of sight while you got on with spending everything I had built.
It was a nursing home, Dad. His voice sharpened. That's not the same as a prison cell. You've turned this into something it never was. I just wanted my own life.
That inheritance was coming to me regardless. You knew that. I put in my time. I was your son. All I did was accelerate things by a few years.
He was still at it. Still engineering the narrative where he was the party wronged. And I was simply failing to be reasonable about it. He had talked himself into believing my money was rightfully his, an inheritance kept hostage by a selfish old man who refused to let go. I shook my head at him.
You were owed nothing, Declan. An inheritance is something given, not a debt that accrues in your favor. Existence alone doesn't entitle a person to a reward. You earn that by constructing something of value. You constructed nothing.