A/N: Even though I don't really like him, I really respect Lie to Me's writers for the way they handle Loker. Every once in a while, right when we think we've got him figured out, they throw us a chewy little morsel of information that makes us completely re-evaluate our preconceptions. This is my attempt to make sense of the seemingly contradictory details that we know about this guy.

Eli

"You know, my father used to always say that there are four rules for getting married. You need a woman who loves you unconditionally, a woman who will always challenge you, a woman who you always want to make love to, and most important of all, you have to make sure that none of those women ever meet. It wasn't really a joke when my father said it, either. It was more like [an] autobiography."

-Eli, "Love Always"

I really hope that my dad hasn't screwed me up forever. We used to spend a lot of time together when I was a kid, just my dad and me. I know that people look at me and just see a nerd, but that's definitely not the way I was raised. My dad's not one for clinical studies and pie charts, so I wasn't the boy who got a chemistry set for Christmas. But of course, it didn't matter—I never wanted one. I just wanted to be more like him. And who wouldn't? He was a self-made man. He came out of nothing and founded a multi-million dollar company with his two bare hands, and with the kind of success that no one in my family had ever came close to achieving before. He was the American dream. How could you not want that?

We used to go hunting, if you can believe it. My grandma owns this nice piece of land in Virginia, right by the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we used to go shooting there all the time. In the fall, Dad would take time out of his board meetings, and it would be my job to bag the Thanksgiving turkey. I'd be so proud when I could get a big one. My dad would take out his big knife and help me clean it so we could bring it home to my mom, and we'd have these long talks about women-folk and The Way the World Was. I don't know how to explain it, but meat tastes better when you've killed it yourself. Or, it used to. I don't really eat meat anymore. These days, even being around a gun makes me nervous, something that I'm sure Reynolds picks up on. Sometimes I wonder what he'd say if he knew that I used to be good with a rifle.

He was a tough guy, my dad. The kind who can walk into a room and make everybody take notice. He was smart, too. By the time he was thirty-five, he'd built up his business so well that it practically ran without him. That left him plenty of free time to throw around a ball in the yard and come to my little league games. When William Loker was in the stands rooting for you, it wasn't hard to get to the head of the pack. It didn't matter that I was awkward and shy. Let's just say that I was never the kind of kid who was short on friends, and I had my dad to thank for it. Well, that and the fact that New Kids on the Block sang at my birthday party.

Never did I once pick up on it. Not once. That's how good he was at hiding it. I was as surprised as my mom was when she found out that he had not one, but two mistresses. I turned out that all of that free time he'd had, when he told us he was doing charity work, he was actually doing something very—well, this is the part where Foster stops me, so we'll leave it at that. What really surprised me, even more than the affairs, was that one of his mistresses was on his board of directors. She'd been a friend of the family so long that you can see her in my parent's wedding photos, which were taken about the same time they started sleeping together. The other was some blonde stripper he replaced every couple of years. It really confused me back then, but looking back, all those father-son talks we had make a lot more sense.

My mom was devastated, of course. Women who go through what she did tend to be wound very tight, to put it mildly. I didn't know her very well before it was just us. I used to kind of just think of her as the woman with the apron. I had no idea what to do with her when she walked around the house crying all day. I made a comment once about what time of the month it was, and she slapped me for the first time, hard. She told me that she'd given her whole life to my father, and that he'd turned his back on us. That was when I started to hate him, even though Mom told me not to. Sometimes I couldn't sleep because I hated him so much. There were just so many things going on that I didn't understand.

Somewhere in the midst of all of that, I found a book about apes and started reading. The parallels are unbelievable. I found another book after that, and another. Before you knew it, I was in Lightman's lab, wearing collared shirts and sneakers. At some point during my first few weeks with Foster, I made a remark that sounded like something my dad would say. She didn't slap me, but she gave me a look that could melt steel. My whole perspective on women changed after that. Between working for Foster and all of that feminist lit I've been reading, I'd like to think that this apple is inching a little farther from the tree every day. I'd never do what he did. I'm many things, but I'm neither a womanizer nor a liar.

Sure, I don't run a huge company, but I don't need to. This job is better than anything I could have dreamed. It's a small castle, of course, but I'm the king. That's all the power I need. As long as I deliver results, people let me do things my way. Most of the time, I like to just fade into the background and watch people. All of that sitting and waiting I did as a hunter had to be good for something. You wouldn't believe the things that I know about this place, and especially about my bosses. That's a story for another day.

I know that Lightman knows about my family situation, though you can bet that he didn't hear it from me. Lightman doesn't get to where he is without having sources, and he wouldn't cut off a guy's wages if that guy didn't have a trust fund to fall back on. I think he knew that I was hoping I'd never have to use it for anything other than tuition. It was like he was reminding me that I came from the same stock as the Hollins. Well, lesson learned. He put on such a good show, you almost wouldn't think that Foster was the true mastermind behind it all. I wouldn't have caught it if I wasn't watching.

My dad still calls me on birthdays and Christmases. He doesn't say much, just asks me how much I'm making and sees if I need any financial help. Then, he says he expects a call around Father's Day, which he never gets. I just know that if I get too close to him, well, maybe I'll be the person I used to be. Maybe I'll forget about all of the crap he put my mother through and regress into the ape he is. I can't risk that when I've finally found a woman that I can have a healthy relationship with. When you find a woman who finds your quirky ways endearing, who treats you like an equal even though she is way out of your league, you do what you can to keep her around. One woman like that is better than three who aren't. So, I try to learn a little more each day how to be the kind of man that Ria needs me to be.

Of course, if she knew, she'd just laugh at me.

A/N: Tomorrow: Ria.