But my daughter isn’t responsible for any of it, and neither was I, and everything you’ve done has only made you into the exact thing you say you hate.
You didn’t avenge your boy.
You became the people who killed him.”
I had not planned to say it.
It came up out of me from somewhere deeper than strategy, and even as I heard myself I understood it was the truest thing I’d said in the whole nightmare, and that it applied to more people in the story than Braddock.
Because that was the machine underneath all of it, wasn’t it — the idea that a debt could be inherited, that guilt ran in blood, that the child could be made to pay the parent’s account.