Page 68 of Swerve
“I looked it up. Head-on with a drunk driver.”
I do look at him then, surprise underscoring the single word question. “Why?” And then I realize the answer. “Because I’m a suspect.”
“In the beginning, we have to consider all angles.”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“Did you have a fight with your parents before that night?”
“Yes.”
“Said things you wish you could take back?”
“Yes.”
“We all have, Emory.”
I look down at my hands, see the places on my palm where I’ve dug my nails in. “But some of us get the chance to apologize. Ask for forgiveness.”
“True. But they loved you, right?”
“Yes. Although from here, I can’t imagine why.”
“Do you think they would want you to live with guilt over their deaths?”
“No. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.”
“My guess is you’ve devoted your life to your sister in an effort to make up for that guilt.”
“I love my sister. There wasn’t anyone else.”
“Not every eighteen-year-old would be willing to grow up overnight to raise a sibling.”
I consider this, but cannot imagine having made any other choice.
“Life took a horrible turn, and you made the most of it. Give yourself credit for that.”
“What kind of person would I have been to do anything other than what I did?”
“The kind I meet every day in my job. The kind who takes their shattered dreams out on their kid so they end up in the foster system. The kind who beats their dog because they had a bad day. The kind who dumps their old dad at the nursing home and never gets around to going to see him. A lot of people operate from the origin point of self first. So, yeah, you could have made some very different choices given your age and how much essentially becoming a parent was going to change your life.”
I let the words sink in, and, on some level, I do know that I’ve tried to do right by Mia, to make up in whatever way I could for the ragged ending of my relationship with my parents. “One of the things I find myself telling patients most often is the need to figure out how to forgive themselves for the things they can’t seem to let go of. And yet, I can’t do it myself. That doesn’t make me much of a psychiatrist, does it?”
“It’s a tall order,” he says, his voice dipping under a note of what sounds like empathy. “Believe me, I know.”
I want to ask how he knows, but I’m not sure either one of us needs to go there.
The Proprietor
“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
—Seneca
SHE COULDN’T FIND a speck of public dirt on Senator Will Arrington. She’d run him through her standard check process, and it was rigorous.
So she contacted the next rung on her ladder, a former FBI agent who’d been released from his position when he’d been caught selling information to a foreign government. Ten years in prison had honed his already admirable willingness to go to whatever lengths necessary to meet a client’s expectations.
He’d hand-delivered a dossier to her with nuggets of useful feedback she knew weren’t available on the regular person’s internet. But then she wanted the stuff that wasn’t readily available elsewhere. Those things that exposed a person’s true vulnerabilities. Made it impossible for him to choose owning up to conscience as an option.
