Page 59 of Secret Husband
She barked out a laugh. “How is that even the same thing?”
I shrugged. “Because if you’re terrible at something you will blame anything—even your balls—for your bad performance.”
“You crazy Russians.”
I liked that she found it amusing. I was determined to do anything to make her smile. “Who does this crazy Russian blame for your upset?”
“You don’t need to hear this.”
I frowned. “Is it related to women’s problems? Periods or such?”
“No, but if it was?”
“I would tuck you under the covers and read you a bedtime story.”
She smiled. “You have an answer to everything. But not to this. It’s my father.”
“He is ill?”
She shook her head. “He’s about to be sent back to prison.”
Back? “This is not his first time.”
“No. He has a history of stealing from people, taking their savings and pretending to invest it, but really he pays one client with the funds from another.”
“A triangle scheme.”
“Pyramid, but you have the idea. Today he was found guilty and he’ll be sentenced in a few weeks. It doesn’t look good because he’s a repeat offender. He asked me to come to the trial, so it would look like his family was supporting him. I didn’t.” She looked up. “That makes me a bad daughter, right?”
“It makes you a human.” I knew something of the pain of an incarcerated father, though my father’s crimes would not be considered punishable by the West. “When was he in prison before?”
“When I was twelve until the age of fifteen. I lived with my sister and Gunnar, and when he was released, I tried to make it up to him.”
“What do you have to make up to him? He did these things that took him away from you. What about your mother?”
“She died when I was twelve. Ovarian cancer. He blamed her death for losing control, pushing him to make all those mistakes.”
Both of us motherless. I knew there was a reason for the closeness I felt to her.
“We have to accept responsibility for our actions, do we not?” As a journalist, my father’s anti-corruption crusade was considered brave by many, a beacon of democracy in the gutter of authoritarianism. Yet it had produced negative consequences for my mother, or at least that was the story he preferred to tell. It worked better for his brand.
But today was not about my father.
“I suppose. Now he—he wants me to say something nice about him,” she went on. “To give him a character reference and tell the court that he’s a good person at heart, but I don’t know if he is. And I worry that turning him down means I’m not a good person either.”
Tears fell down her cheeks, and I rushed to wipe them away with my thumbs.
“How could you think you are not good? You are the captain, an example to all your teammates, the person everyone trusts to lead them.”
“Yeah, goody two shoes.”
I did not understand. “You have two shoes and they are … good?”
“I’m never the bad girl, the one who gets to indulge her dark side. Instead, I’m the good daughter, obedient sister, great friend, exemplary captain. I always do the right thing. Because I can’t be like him.”
“You will not be. But no one expects you to be perfect, either.”
My hand still cupped her jaw, and the warmth of her skin seeped into my palm and all the way up my arm. But it was her eyes that held me captive—those silver discs, mercurial and seeking. I found myself moving incrementally toward her. Aching to be close, though I knew nothing good could come of it. At least, nothing good for her.
