Framed pictures of Brian Corliss and a blond woman and a blond boy sat on the mantel, on the shelves of a credenza, on top of the fridge. Collages of them hung on the walls. You could follow the boy’s growth from birth to what looked like four. The blond woman was Donna, I assumed. She was attractive the way sports bar hostesses and pharmaceutical reps are—hair the color of rum and lots of it, teeth as bright as Bermuda. She had the look of a woman who kept her plastic surgeon on speed dial. Her breasts were prominently displayed in most of the photos and looked like perfect softballs made of flesh. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock. In a couple of the photos—just a couple—stood a dark-haired girl with anxious eyes and an unsure, fleshy chin: Sophie.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“It’s been a few months.”
Angie and I looked across the counter at him.
He held up both palms. “I know, I know. But there were extenuating . . .” He grimaced and then smiled. “Let’s just say parenting is not easy. You have any kids?”
“One,” I said. “Daughter.”
“How old?”
“Four.”
“Little child,” he said, “little problems. Big child, big problems.” He looked across the counter at Angie. “And you, miss?”
“We’re married.” Angie tilted her head toward me. “Same four-year-old.”
That seemed to please him. He smiled to himself and hummed under his breath as he put a dozen eggs and a half-gallon of skim milk into the fridge.
“She was such a happy child.” He finished emptying the bag and folded it neatly before putting it under the counter. “A joy every day. I fully admit I was unprepared for the day she turned into such a Sullen Sally.”
“And what turned her into . . . that?” Angie asked.
He peered at the eggplant he pulled from the next bag, frozen for a moment. “Her mom,” he said. “God rest her. But, yes, she . . .” He looked up from the eggplant as if surprised to find us there. “She left.”
“How old was Sophie when she left?”
“Well, she left with Sophie.”
“So, she left you. She didn’t leave Sophie.” Angie glanced at me. “I’m a little lost, Brian.”
Brian put the eggplant into the crisper drawer. “I regained custody when Sophie was ten. She—this is hard—Sophie’s mother? She developed a chemical dependency. First on Vicodin, then on OxyContin. She stopped acting like a responsible adult. Then she left me and went to live with someone else. And they created a wholly unfit environment for a child to grow up in, believe me.” He looked at both of us, waiting, it appeared, for an indication of agreement.
I gave him my best empathetic nod and commiserating gaze.
“So I sued for custody,” he said, “and eventually I won.”
“How many years was Sophie with her mother before that?” Angie asked.
“Three.”
“Three . . .”
“Sophie’s mother was addicted to painkillers throughout that time?” I asked.
“Eventually. I mean, she stopped, or claimed she did. For the full three years.”
“So what created the unsafe environment?”
He gave us a warm smile. “Nothing I feel comfortable discussing right now.”
“Okay,” I said.
Angie said, “So you brought Sophie back here when she was ten?”
He nodded. “And at first it was a little awkward, because I hadn’t been a permanent fixture in her life for six years, but then, I’ll tell you something, we figured it out. We found our rhythm. We did.”
“Six years,” Angie said. “I thought you said three.”
“No, no. Her mother and I separated when Sophie was just turning seven and then I had to fight three years for custody, but the six years I’m talking about were the first six years of her life. I was overseas during most of that. And Sophie and her mother were here.”
“So really,” Angie said with an edge in her voice I wasn’t real keen on, “you missed her whole life.”
“Huh?” His open face closed and darkened.
“Overseas, Brian?” I said. “As in military?”
“Affirmative.”
“Doing what?”
“Protecting this country.”
“No doubt,” I said. “And thank you. Sincerely. Thank you. I’m just wondering where you served.”
He closed the fridge door and folded and stowed the last of the paper bags. He gave me that warm, warm smile of his. “So you can second-guess the gravity of my contribution?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “It’s just a question.”
After an awkward few seconds, he held up a hand and smiled wider. “Of course, of course. I apologize. I was a civil engineer with Bechtel in Dubai.”
Angie kept her voice light. “I thought you said you were in the military.”
“No,” he said, his eyes fixed on nothing. “I agreed to your partner’s description when he said as in the military. When you’re in the Emirates, working for a government friendly to ours, you may as well be in the military. You are most certainly a target of any jihadist who decides to blow you into meat scraps because you symbolize his cockeyed idea of Western corruption and influence. I didn’t want my daughter growing up in that.”
“So why take the job in the first place?”
“I’ll tell you, Angela, I’ve asked myself that a thousand times, and the answer’s not one I’m proud of.” He gave us the hapless shrug of a charming child. “The money was too good to pass up. There. I admit it. The tax break, too. I knew if I worked my tail off for five years, I’d come home with a king’s ransom I could put toward my family and toward building my personal-training enterprise.”
“Which you obviously did,” I said. “And quite well.” I was good cop, today. Maybe even kiss-ass cop. Whatever works, says I.
He looked from his kitchen bar at his living room like a modern-day Alexander with no worlds left to conquer. “So, yes, it was not the greatest idea to think I could hold a family together while I was six thousand miles away. And I own that failure. I do. But when I returned, I came home to a wife with substance abuse issues and a value system I found”—he shrug-winced—”distasteful. We fought a lot. I couldn’t get Cheryl to see how destructive she was being to Sophie. And the more I tried to get her to see the truth, the more she retreated into denial. One day, I came home to an empty house.” Another wince, another shrug. “I spent the next three years fighting for my rights as a father and, eventually, I won. I won.”