“I don’t know what he meant. Honestly? My father blames me for what happened.”
“What?” Marjorie’s face reddened.
“I know it sounds terrible. But I’m a grown man, and I couldn’t fight off”—he looked meekly to me—“your father.”
A brick hit my gut. My father had been a big man, like I was, but Colin was hardly small. He was thin now, still recovering from his abuse, but he was six feet tall and, according to Marj, had been strongly built before.
“Are you saying he wants to make you pay?” Marjorie asked. “That hardly makes sense.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. He thinks I’m weak. But that started long before your father…” He gulped.
“He’s manipulating you,” I said, more to myself than to Colin or Marj. “He thinks the more he tells you you’re weak, the stronger you’ll be.”
The words echoed in my head. I’d heard them, or some variation of them, before. From my father? No, my father was never unkind to me.
Yet as I said the words and then heard them again in an echo, it was my father’s voice that uttered them.
“Bryce?” Marj said. “You okay?”
I cleared my head quickly and nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’ve often wondered,” Colin continued, “what my father’s childhood was like. He never spoke of it, and his parents were dead before I was born.”
“How did they die?” I asked.
He stayed silent.
“A car crash, wasn’t it?” Marjorie said. “I think that’s what Jade told me.”
“Yeah,” Colin mumbled.
“So you don’t really know much about your father,” I said. “What kind of man he is?”
“Oh, I know what kind of man he is. I’m finding out more by the minute. Things I don’t want to know. Things that…”
I couldn’t quite read the tone of Colin’s voice, and for a moment, I felt a kinship with him. He both loved and hated his father.
I could relate.
“In my father’s mind,” Colin continued, “I should have been strong enough to escape…or better yet, to not be in the position in the first place.”
“Are you and he close?” I asked.
“In some ways. We were, anyway. Not anymore. Not the more…”
“The more what?”
“Nothing,” he said. “No, I’d say we’re no longer close.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” Marj queried.
“It has everything to do with everything,” I said. “His feelings about his father are going to color what he tells us.”
“You mean whether he tells us everything?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
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