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“Tell me.” There was a rare tinge of anger in Gohvis’ voice now. “Long have I pondered these questions. Each time I have broached the subject in the past, you have evaded or deflected or denied me outright. So if you are finally ready to be candid with me, to acknowledge that it has not all been some insecure concoction of my own mind, then you must tell me the whole truth of it, Father. Have I not been a good son to you? What is the ultimate source of this distrust you have in me? It cannot merely be that man’s death, can it?”

And again, Dozer nearly laughed. He shook his head, instead, knowing all too well that his son would find such condescension nigh intolerable during a moment like this. If there was to be any hope of salvaging anything between the two of them, right now, then he had keep himself steady. He needed to not be indulgent. “...You freely admit to be working with the Vanguard, and yet you still wonder why I might distrust you?”

“No,” said Gohvis. “While that is what things have come to, I speak of before. In the past. I was never anything but loyal to you. Is it so strange that I should begin to consider other options when you have been so persistently impossible to please?”

Dozer bobbed his head. “It is not. I understand that part of you very well.” He took a moment to both measure his next words and also give his son a chance to respond again, but when Gohvis merely waited, he continued on. “And truthfully, on some level, I respect you for that decision. You are stepping out of my shadow, if only a little. Any halfway decent father should feel at least a modicum of pride in that.”

Gohvis just stared at him with those deathly red eyes of his. After the slight emotion they’d shown earlier, now they were back to being as impossible to read as usual.

He was waiting for more, Dozer knew. Because the main question had still not be addressed.

Why did he struggle to trust Gohvis as he had trusted Suresh? Suresh, a man who had even become openly hostile to him toward the end.

Why should his son be held in such comparably low esteem to a man such as that? Especially when the two were quite similar in many ways?

He had to admit. The boy’s confusion was understandable.

And tragic, perhaps.