Page 48 of You, Only You

"My job was to audit him," I continued. "To expose him if he was corrupt. But the people he targets, they are corrupt. They're predators. And he stops them in ways the law can't or won't." I looked down at my hands, pale against the dark table. "I'm helping him now. With a case. And the methods aren't all strictly legal."

"And you're wondering if you're turning into me."

He said it flat. Not gentle, not cautious. Flat. Like he'd been waiting for one of his children to show up and ask this, and the fact that it had finally happened was neither a surprise nor a relief.

"I'm wondering if I'm turning into Mom," I said, and the correction came out before I'd fully decided to make it. "Looking at his methods and telling myself the ends justify the means. Making excuses because I..." I stopped, my throat tight. "Because I have feelings for him. Strong ones. And I'm scared that I'm doing exactly what she did. Seeing the red flags and calling them something else. Convincing myself that this time is different because it feels different."

Silence stretched between us. My father looked at me with an expression that was hard to read. Not because it was blank, but because too many things were happening in it at once.

"The first time I crossed a line," he said slowly, "I told myself it was borrowing."

I went still.

"A short-term loan from the pension fund to cover a cash flow problem. I was going to pay it back before anyone noticed.The numbers worked, Lindsey. I ran the projections. I had a spreadsheet." He gave a hollow laugh. "The spreadsheet said I'd have it back in six months. The spreadsheet was wrong."

"Dad..."

"Let me finish." He held up a hand. "After that, it got easier. That's the part nobody tells you about. The first time is agony. You don't sleep, you check the numbers every hour, you're convinced someone's going to notice. But nobody notices. And the second time... the second time I convinced myself I deserved it. Years of being passed over for promotions, watching less competent men get ahead because of who they knew. I wasn't stealing. I was correcting an imbalance. That's what I told myself." His eyes met mine. "The lies got easier. The first one was heavy. The tenth was nothing. By the twentieth, I didn't even recognize them as lies anymore. They were just... the way things worked."

His words painted something I could see clearly, because I'd spent my career looking at exactly this architecture. The progression. The rationalization. The gradual erosion of the line until there was no line left, just a smooth slope with no handholds.

"How do I know I'm not already on that slope?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "How do I know I'm not just at the beginning, telling myself the first lie?"

My father was quiet for a moment. He rubbed his thumb across the back of his other hand, a gesture I remembered from childhood. He did it when he was thinking. When he was trying to find the right words for something complicated. I used to watch him do it at the dinner table while helping me with homework.

"What's he after?" he asked.

"What?"

"This man. When he breaks the rules. What's the endgame? What's he getting out of it?"

I thought about Will. The storage unit, seven years of hunting. The way he'd looked when he told me about Nicole. The cold, focused fury he brought to dismantling predators who hurt people who couldn't fight back.

"Justice," I said. "For people the system failed."

"Not money? Not a bigger office? Not his name in the paper?"

"No." I was certain of that, at least. "He doesn't profit from any of it. He doesn't want recognition. He just... can't stop fighting."

My father nodded slowly. "Then it's different. I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's safe. But it's a different compass heading."

He leaned forward, and I saw something shift in his face. For a moment, underneath the prison pallor and the new lines and the weight of eight years, I saw the man who'd taught me to ride a bike. Who'd held the seat steady. Who'd lied about letting go, and that had been a lie too, a small one, a kind one, the kind you tell a child so she'll pedal hard enough to stay upright on her own.

"But here's what I want you to hear, Linds." He hadn't called me that in years. The nickname hit me somewhere soft and unprotected. "The question you're asking, whether you're becoming me, that's not really the question. The question is about trust."

I frowned. "Trust?"

"Whether you can trust your own judgment. Whether you can look at this man and what he does and what you're doing with him and say, honestly, 'I see this clearly. I'm not being fooled.'" He looked away, swallowing hard. "That's what I took from you. From your mother. Not just the money, not just thesecurity. I took your ability to trust what you see. Because you saw me every day for twenty-four years and you didn't see the truth, and that taught you that your own eyes are liars."

The room blurred. I blinked, hard, and it came back into focus.

"I stole that from you," he said, his voice rough. "And I can't give it back. But I can tell you this: the fact that you're sitting here, asking these questions, scared out of your mind that you might be wrong? That's not weakness. That's the opposite."

"How is being terrified the opposite of weakness?"

"Because I was never scared." He said it simply, like a confession that had taken years to articulate. "Not once. The whole time I was doing it, I never sat down and asked myself, 'Am I becoming something I don't want to be?' I never doubted. I was sure. And certainty, when you're doing something wrong, is the most dangerous thing in the world."

I stared at him. The man who'd been certain. Who'd run the projections and trusted the spreadsheet and never once questioned whether the numbers were lying because he was the one who'd built them.