Because the awful thing was, in her own warped way, she was finally naming the true issue. It had never been only greed. Greed was the method. The engine underneath it was humiliation. She saw what I had given our parents and instead of letting that inspire gratitude, she experienced it as accusation. Daniel gave her a way to convert that feeling into action. Not kind action. Not righteous action. But action she could survive by while he dressed it in practicality.
“I’m not asking for everything to go back,” she said. “I know it can’t.”
Good, I thought. Because that part was true too.
My father leaned forward, forearms on his knees, hands clasped. “Did you think about your mother on that porch?”
Claire shut her eyes.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you stop it?”
She looked at him with a face so wrecked it barely looked like my sister. “Because by then if I stopped it, I had to admit what I’d already allowed.”
That answer sat in the room like a verdict.