Chapter 12 #2
The room just off the living room was usually kept shut.
Morgan and I rarely ever felt a need to step into our father’s home office.
It was a sizeable room, walled with rows and rows of brown wood shelving.
On the shelves were at least ten dozen books, propped up in alphabetical order, giving the room a stale paper smell.
I never had a reason to not like this room.
Until now.
Dad faced me, looking down to my eyes as we both stood. My father had never given me a reason to think he might smack me, but I also couldn’t remember a time I’d given him a reason to. Ultimately, he only stared at me, his face a picture of disbelief, of unrecognition.
Perhaps I might’ve preferred it if he just hit me.
He sounded unfamiliar when he said, “Sit down,” and motioned toward the single seat situated in front of his desk. Wordlessly, he walked to his desk chair and sunk into it, facing me.
“Lauren.” His voice broke. Dad was a strange mixture of absolutely pissed and… sad? “What the hell has happened? How? Why?” The last question sounded almost desperate.
“Daddy, I… He’s… Kain is —”
He didn’t want to hear it, raising a hand to stop me right there. At the sound of Kain’s name, the sadness in my father’s features melted away, leaving behind only the anger. It was as if saying his name was a trigger that put my father on a whole new trajectory.
“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” This was a rhetorical question. As far as my father was concerned, I’d definitely lost my mind. “Lauren Alyssa Caplan, do you know what the fuck I do for a living?” That was not a rhetorical question.
Daddy just shouted the F-word at me. This was new. “Yes, sir.”
I’d never called him sir before, but since we were trying new things…
“What do I do for a living?”
“You’re Florida’s eleventh circuit state attorney.”
“Seems like you forgot what that means.”
Oh, so now we’re going to forget that I practically spent my entire childhood in his office, absorbing? If anything, the fact that I knew so much and still trusted Kain Montgomery should have shed some light on Kain’s true nature.
“You’re a prosecutor. You represent the side of the legal trial that is going against the person accused of breaking the law. Yeah, Daddy… I was paying attention. You put away the bad guys,” I recalled the way that he used to explain it to me when I was four years-old.
And Kain is not one of the bad guys!
“The worst guys,” he amended. “I’ve seen the most unbelievably sick shit—” Oh, so he’s just going to keep cussing “—working this field. I’ve seen liars.
Drug dealers. Pimps. Thieves. Murderers.
People with absolutely no regard for others.
People who I’m convinced are barely human.
Horrible, horrible people. And you know what? ”
“What?”
“None of them were even half as bad—not even half as bad—as the father of the kid you called your boyfriend tonight.” Dad slammed a fist on his desk, startling me.
“A Montgomery! Really, Lauren? That’s what you’ve been up to all this time?
Running around with thugs and—” Dad realized something.
“And Morgan knew about this, too? That crap she was talking about biblical names at dinner? She thinks this is a game? Do you think this is a game?”
“Daddy—”
He interrupted me. “Who are you? Seriously! Who the hell are you?”
“It just happened! Kain has done me so many favors—”
“That’s what this is about? Montgomery does God-knows-what for you, and you repay him with what? Yourself? What the hell happened to ‘thank you’? Where did you even come across…” Dad’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What favors did he do for you? Are you on drugs, or something?”
Of course Dad would reach that conclusion. Now that I was out dating “thugs”, I was probably a drug-addicted prostitute, too. Anything was possible now that he’d heard Kain Montgomery call me his girl.
“I was at a party. Someone slipped me something. He saved me.” I kept my explanation vague.
Dad was a smart person in the legal field, he could fill in the blanks.
I wasn’t dumb enough to list everything Kain had done for me.
Even if it might make my father see Kain in a new light, I refused to implicate him in a legal investigation.
Kain trusted me with so much. I wouldn’t make him regret it.
Instead, I told a half truth. “He’d been giving me self-defense lessons. And… shit happens.”
Dad was too far beyond his outrage threshold to give attention to the fact that I was throwing around the S-word now.
“Self-defense lessons.” When he said it that way, it really did sound like I was lying.
Except — technically — I wasn’t…
“Yeah, I could show you,” I suggested. Dad only blinked in my direction. I sighed, changing the subject. “Kain is nothing like his father.”
“Child…” Dad sounded like he pitied me then, like he knew something I didn’t, “Kain Montgomery practically is his father. A literal wolf in sheep’s clothing.
They put him in college. Got his image looking real straight and narrow.
Aspirations of law school, I hear. Can you believe that?
Law school! Not in the state of Florida, if I can help it. ”
I felt a lurch in my stomach, my eyebrow twitching with an anger I tried to conceal from my father.
In the past few weeks, there had been two occasions when Kain flew down a weekend before an exam in one of his classes.
Per my insistence, he would use our time together to study.
Kain would completely zone out into the material, only looking up from his reading glasses every once in a while to check up on me.
There was passion there, a desire for excellence.
Kain was most attractive to me when he got in that headspace.
I could watch him go over his well-organized notes for hours—and I did!
Kain didn’t have to tell me what I could already see.
Despite what he’d told me the first night we met, becoming a lawyer was clearly his dream.
People don’t work that hard unless they’re working towards something they’ve wanted forever.
Kain wanted to be a lawyer in the same way I wanted to be a psychiatrist.
And my father had just copped to doing everything in his power to make sure it doesn’t happen.
I was livid.
Dad continued to go on and on about how bad Kain certainly was.
“Every witness who’s gotten close enough to the family, that we’ve interviewed, has said the same thing about that boy. That he’s so much like his father that it’s unnerving, but he’s smarter than Silas, making him worse. More dangerous. More manipulative.”
“Being smarter can also mean more rational,” I reasoned. “Less reckless.”
“A thoughtful criminal is only just that—a criminal.” Dad cocked his head to the side. “Are you defending him?”
I shrugged. “I’m not jumping to conclusions.”
Dad shook his head, disappointed in me. Truthfully?
I had stopped caring about his disappointment after that law school comment.
Here my father was, trying to convince me I was dating a bad person.
All he’d managed to do was shine a little light on his own devious nature.
Before tonight, no one could tell me that my Daddy was anything less than perfect.
On the wheels of his desk chair, Dad rolled backward toward the filing cabinet behind his desk, opening a drawer to search for a file.
“What’s this?” I asked after a folder was harshly slapped against the wooden surface of my father’s desk.
Without answering me, my father pulled out a photo of a younger Kain.
My teeth bit into my lower lips, biting back a smile.
With shining eyes, a Kain that couldn’t have been more than six years old smiled up at me.
His smile wasn’t so much of a smile, as much as it was the look of a person who knew something funny about you and was trying not to laugh. He was adorable.
“Kain Montgomery – at the age of five – told his class that when people die, their bodies get really hard. Very matter-of-factly – like he’d seen it.
Child protective services was called. He was interviewed, and at the age of five, he said, ‘I don’t recall,’ twenty-eight times throughout the interview.
Like he’d been coached. They had to remind themselves that it wasn’t an interrogation. ”
Dad set down another photo.
This photo was a more recent capture, a candid shot taken of Kain no doubt by some kind of private investigator.
In the picture, Kain was seated in the middle of a private dinner, fork mid-stab into something on his plate as he gave his attention to the man before him – Silas Montgomery, his father.
Eyes at attention, expression neutral, nothing out of the ordinary.
Kain looked like most kids at dinner with their parents — uninterested.
Was I supposed to be horrified that Kain appeared comfortable with Silas?
Sure, Silas Montgomery was as bad as they came, but really…
He was also Kain’s father. Why wouldn’t he be comfortable?
“You follow him,” I concluded.
Dad shook his head. “This photo was taken two years ago. We were following Silas.” To my blank expression, Dad explained further. “This photo was taken on Kain’s eighteenth birthday. A birthday dinner, in a sense.”
“That’s… kind of normal…” I shot my father a questioning look.
“Normal stops there. Two years ago, Silas Montgomery put every dime he’s ever made and saved in his son’s name.
This eighteen-year-old boy became the third richest person in the state of Florida overnight—a billionaire.
And that’s just reported income. There’s no telling how much isn’t accounted for since drugs, prostitution, and God-knows-what else don’t come with tax forms.”