Virgil's just flipped his late-night grilled cheese sandwich for the first time, when the yelling upstairs starts in earnest.
Loud enough to hear from the kitchen on the floor below, but distant enough that he can't make out the words, or exactly who's doing the shouting.
Still, it's not like it's hard to guess. Gordon was late getting home from their impromptu twenty-four hours off. The last time Virgil had seen Scott, he was waiting up for their little brother, watching out the window. Virgil had hobbled discreetly past him, hadn't wanted to get involved. Scott, for his part, had mercifully let him pass.
But the sound of the argument is distant, its topic is predictable, and Virgil can maintain the deceptive personal fiction that he can't, actually, hear his brothers fighting. Not over the sound of the rain pounding on the pool deck outside, at least. Of course, the windows are soundproofed against the periodic launches of assorted supersonic paramilitary aircraft, and the technology that keeps the sound out is equally as good as keeping sound in, reverberating around the cavernous open spaces of the villa—but Virgil can still pretend he doesn't hear his brothers. The heavens have opened up, thunder and lightning chasing each other to and fro across the sky, above their very own tempest in a teacup. Virgil shifts his weight, leaning on one of his crutches, gives his grilled cheese sandwich a nudge with the edge of the spatula. Everyone knows the second side cooks faster than the first, after all, and it doesn't pay to be inattentive, even when one's brothers are tearing into one another on the next floor up.
It's been just shy of three weeks since Virgil broke his leg. Fractured tibia. Not severe, but he'll be four to six weeks healing up, and then it'll be a further four months of PT and careful handling before he's all the way better. The cast that covers his lower left calf is custom made, 3D printed from sturdy plastic, and apparently has the added, unexpected property of rendering him basically invisible to the rest of the household.
Or inconsequential, anyway.
And nobody means anything by it, and cognitively Virgil knows that—but the truth is, he's spent the past three weeks feeling oddly disconnected from the rest of the family's life at large. Being taken abruptly out of the ongoing, rigorous cycle of work, sleep, rinse, repeat has been jarring, to say the least. It's not that he has nothing to contribute—he's dutifully manned the comms for consultation purposes on at least half the missions his brothers have run—but it feels a little like they're humouring him, tolerating the presence of an outsider, and all the while quietly resenting the fact that he hasn't got his boots on the ground alongside them, figuratively or literally, though that's neither his fault nor his preference.
It's not true, of course, and Virgil knows it's not true, mostly because he'd gone to John looking for reassurance after Gordon had gotten particularly short and sharp with him during a particularly stressful rescue in the Baltic Sea. He'd gotten a wry, blandly sardonic little pep talk about the fact that of course everyone understands that he's still useful and valid and as much a member of IR as ever—it's just that emotions run high on the job and a perspective once removed from the situation at hand isn't always welcome. And naturally John would know.
There was a certain, documented irony in having had this talk while Virgil was sat on his ass on the couch in the lounge and John was midflight in his exosuit, spotting for Scott as he jetpacked around the precarious repair of a dangerously listing suspension bridge. Virgil had taken the hint and left them to it.
And so his life on the bench has lately been spent hobbling around the house on crutches, feeling useless and sullenly wishing their father's penchant had been for elevators rather than of the sweeping architectural curve of an elegant floating staircase, or winding steps hewn into corridors of solid rock. Or that he could've picked out an island that sprawled in a horizontal rather than a vertical dimension. There are, remarkably, only three elevators on Tracy Island, if one doesn't count the one Scott takes down to TB1 or the one John takes up to TB5. The first goes from the main floor up into the upper part of the house, back through the kitchen. Another goes down to the hangar from the villa, the last goes up to the Round House from the hangar. Both of these are, incidentally, the places where Brains is most likely to be found, though these days he's been preoccupied to the degree that Virgil feels as though joining him in his lab or his work shop is an unwelcome intrusion, and so he's rather reluctantly kept his distance.
Kayo hasn't been around much either.
Not that that matters. It's fine.
Virgil is trying very hard to remember that they don't have the kind of relationship where she would be deliberately avoiding him, but the only place he's been is the only place they have in common, so it's hard to understand why he hasn't seen more of her. She's been busy, but she's not usually that busy. And even when they're both busy, they still manage to run into each other at least a few times a month. It's not like he's unavailable. But it's fine. They see each other when they see each other, they hook up when they hook up, and everything's always fine between them, because there's not enough there for anything to go wrong. It's an arrangement that works for both of them, and has for over a year now. Sometimes they have sex. That's the beginning and the end of it, and Virgil knows that too.
And if there's been a poignant, melancholy ache about his existence that painkillers don't touch, ever since his stupid little brother somehow managed to stumble into a whirlwind romance with the love of his life—well. Green might be Virgil's colour, but he likes to think that the associated envy isn't. He's happy for Gordon—he wouldn't be much of a big brother if he weren't—really and truly. Gordon's got a bigger heart than just about anybody Virgil's ever met. He deserves to be in love with somebody.
So it's fine. For his part, for now, Virgil can satisfy late-night cravings for meaningful companionship with butter and salt and bread and cheese, and pretend like a sandwich will fill the hollow place right in the middle of him, which lately seems like a hole that whistles forlornly when the wind catches it just right.
Possibly it will take two sandwiches.
Virgil flips his grilled cheese onto a waiting plate and picks it up, then nearly drops it at the sound of shattering glass from the floor above. He's frozen in the moment of silence that follows, and then the yelling he'd thought was nothing to be concerned about picks up a level in volume and intensity and it's definitely Scott. Virgil's not sure he can remember the last time he heard Scott get this angry. He's pretty sure the last time Scott got this angry, someone had nearly been killed.
There's no pretending that he doesn't hear the shouting now.
After three weeks, he can manage his broken leg and his crutches and additionally a grilled cheese sandwich if he only needs to get as far as the kitchen table—but he can't get that same sandwich up a flight of stairs. Stairs are still a challenge at the best of times, which is deeply inconvenient when he's lying awake in bed at midnight, desperately craving a grilled cheese sandwich, and the kitchen is two flights of stairs distant. It's even worse when he's starting to wonder if he's going to need to keep his brothers from coming to blows, if they haven't already. He abandons his sandwich on the countertop with only a momentary twinge of mourning, and hops and swings his way over to the stairs. Getting up them is a Process, and he has to be careful not to hurry, or he'll go ass over teakettle back down the stairs and break his other leg, before he's even had a chance to get between his brothers.
It's gotta be Scott and Gordon. John's asleep and Alan's obliterating his retinas with some marathon gaming session. Hobbling up the stairs, Virgil's not sure exactly what this is going to be about—though there's an obvious secret lurking in Gordon's life that Scott's not yet been privy to. Gordon's been surprisingly cagey about Penelope, for as much Virgil knows he loves her. The way his little brother feels about her ladyship is the work of long years of longing, ages of agony over their (not actually that substantial) age difference, and an uncharacteristically pessimistic belief about his odds of ever actually getting a chance with her. Which, in fairness, had been shared by just about everybody with even a peripheral awareness of Gordon's feelings about Penelope. Even if he's somehow managed to prove the broad assumption wrong—Gordon hasn't been shouting it from the mountaintops so much as he's been whispering it in back rooms, behind his hand in the hallway rather than with a megaphone on the roof.
Because apparently it's Scott that Gordon's been afraid of, and apparently with good reason. Their older brother appears at the top of the stairs before Virgil's even made it halfway up. He freezes in the act of getting himself from one stair to the next, as Scott glowers down at him from the top of the staircase, a towering shadow, illuminated briefly by a strike of lightning overhead.
"Did you know about this?" he demands, and the contempt and the anger and the absolute disgust that blacken his tone are enough that Virgil's taken somewhat aback, left a little dumbfounded.
"…know about what?" he hedges, because what he knows about isn't nearly enough to provoke this kind of fury. He has to resist the impulse to get the hell out of Scott's way as he comes storming down the stairs, his step falling so hard that each cleverly engineered stair shakes with his passage.
Scott manages not to shove past Virgl and send him careening down the stairs, as he stops on the broad step beside him and snarls, "Penelope. And Gordon."
The vitriol with which Scott says their brother's name is something Virgil's never heard before, and he only just manages not to flinch. He definitely doesn't know anything about Penelope and Gordon that should've gotten this kind of rise out of Scott, even if Scott's the last one to know about the way the pair of them have gotten together. So it doesn't feel exactly like a lie when he feigns confusion and deflects again, "…what about them?"
Scott just shakes his head, still disgusted, and continues storming down the stairs. "Ask him yourself," he calls over his shoulder, and then vanishes into the darkness of the kitchen below, leaving Virgil to continue his way upstairs.
It takes him another couple of minutes and leaves him a little bit winded (he's lost a hell of a lot of condition, prohibited from working out for the past three weeks), but he makes it to the top of the stairs. When he gets there, it turns out that he can't ask Gordon, because Gordon isn't there. He's not in the lounge, nor is he anywhere immediately in evidence—but Virgil catches a whiff of the sweet, smoky scent of bourbon on the air. This draws his attention to the bar, tucked away behind the fireplace, and it's there that he finds broken glass and a puddle of liquor, gleaming on the hardwood floor. The broken neck of the bottle still lies on the ground, and the telltale red wax seal identifies this as the remains of the bottle of Maker's Mark that usually lives in their father's desk drawer.
Gordon's gone. Scott came storming down to the kitchen, cutting off that escape route, so it seems likely that Gordon's probably fled upstairs. Either way, both of them are beyond Virgil's rather limited reach at the moment, and he slowly makes his way around the bar instead, trying to get a read on a scene that's missing its major players.
There are two glasses on the bar top, ice slowly melting in each. There's a low golden pendant light that hangs above the bar, and by the light of this, the shape of the splatter of whiskey on the floor makes it look like the bottle was hurled straight down at the floor, shattered on purpose. Virgil wonders which one of them threw it. Scott and Gordon both have tempers, that's absolutely true, but it looks like things had started out civilly enough. The pair of them have also been shouldering the bulk of IR's efforts out in the world, and both of them know it. If Virgil had to guess, he wouldn't be surprised if they'd sat down together for a quiet drink to toast the last of their twenty-four hours off, and things had somehow gotten out of hand. It's not like Scott or Gordon to crack under pressure—they're both too professional for that—but once they're off the clock, Virgil knows from experience that all bets are off.
Whatever this was, it must have escalated quickly. It usually takes a hell of a lot more than booze before his brothers will come to blows, and for an altercation to leave a bottle of Dad's bourbon (presumably less two glasses) violently shattered on the hardwood is almost unheard of. They're all responsible adults, and the tumultuous days of knockdown, bare-knuckled fights between a bunch of rambunctious boys trying to grow up around each other are long since over. Mostly. Sometimes, when things get really, really heated, there'll be some getting up in each other's faces, fingers jabbed against collarbones, and very occasionally maybe some shoving—but this seems different. The lounge is empty and quiet now, other than the muted rumble of the storm overhead, but Virgil remembers the distant shouting, and the terrible silence that had followed the sound of breaking glass. Dread creeps into him slowly, along with the realization that something's very, very wrong, and he's too out of the loop to have any idea what it could be.
The stairs up from the main floor to the lounge are too well-engineered to creak, but it's quiet enough that Scott's footsteps are audible before he reaches the top of the stairs, and Virgil hop-skips out from behind the fireplace to face his older brother. Scott's still grim and and blackly furious, but a gingham kitchen towel over his shoulder and a hand broom and dustpan from the kitchen add an almost comical cast of domesticity to his reappearance. He's obviously come back to clean up the mess, though Virgil knows from experience that the scent of alcohol will linger in the air. He hobbles wordlessly out of the way as Scott crosses the room to clean up the mess, and it takes him a few moments to work up the nerve to ask, "What…Scott, what the hell happened?"
Scott's gotten down on his hands and knees, gingerly picking up the larger chunks of glass and putting them into the dustpan. He chuckles darkly at the question, and then answers, "Gordon fucked Penelope and now she's pregnant."
It's not like Scott to be unnecessarily crude, but his choice of language isn't what's shocking. Virgil hears himself gasp and if he didn't have to keep himself upright on crutches, he might be literally staggered by the news. He's almost not sure he heard correctly, but then, there's not a lot of room for ambiguity. And it immediately and entirely explains why Scott's so angry. "Oh, shit."
Scott drops another chunk of glass into the dustpan and then gestures to the mess he's in the middle of cleaning up, as he asks a sarcastic question, "Or did you mean what happened here? Because what happened here is that when I told him off for being an irresponsible little idiot, he tried to throw a fucking bottle of bourbon at me about it."
"Jesus." This is a red flag, though Scott may not know enough to realize it. Gordon's got a reputation for being scrappy, but Virgil knows him well enough to know that this is generally only when provoked. And it would take a hell of a lot of provocation before he'd do something like this. So the logical conclusion is that Scott must have said something, and considering the language he's employed so far, it was probably nothing good. Virgil knows better than to say so, but if Gordon was pushed so far as to smash a bottle of bourbon in retaliation, then there's a very really possibility that Scott got off lightly.
This probably isn't something Scott appreciates at the moment, given the way the tirade continues, "I cannot believe him. I can't believe he's done this, the stupid little moron. This is going to ruin everything."
The last few shards of broken glass clatter in the dustpan, and Scott's attention stays fixed on the puddle of liquor on the floor as he starts to mop it up with the dish towel he's fetched from the kitchen. Virgil can already tell this isn't going to be sufficient to the task, and without being asked he makes his way to the back of the bar in search of more towels.
It's not the right thing to say, and so Virgil doesn't say it, but honestly he can't believe it either. Despite what he sometimes seems to want people to believe, Gordon isn't stupid. Far from it. And he's not irresponsible, either. If Virgil had to rank his brothers from the most to least conscientious, he'd have a hard time deciding whether John or Gordon got the top spot, and privately suspects that John would cheerfully concede the title to Gordon. Scott can be reckless and Alan can be overconfident, but Gordon is always thorough, always careful and well-prepared, and this just isn't the sort of thing Virgil would've ever expected of him. It doesn't track with his history, his level of experience. By this point in his life, he's slept with probably at least a couple hundred people, all of whom were less important to him than Penelope is, and there's never been anything like this kind of consequence. It's not the sort of thing Gordon would've let happen.
But not everybody knows Gordon quite as well as Virgil does, and in deciding to tell Scott about this, before telling anyone else, Gordon might just have done something even stupider than getting Penelope pregnant. It's a selfish thing to wonder, but Virgil can't help asking himself why his little brother wouldn't have come to him, first.
At least it means he can answer honestly, when Scott approaches the bar, ignoring the towels Virgil's stacked helpfully on the bar top as he demands, "Tell me you didn't fucking know about this."
"I didn't know he could've gotten her pregnant," Virgil answers, with the spirit of the truth if not the letter of it, exactly. Kayo had had her suspicions. Virgil hadn't wanted to speculate. That might've been a mistake.
Scott's hands land atop the bar, accusing, interrogative. "What did you know?"
He has to plot a careful, delicate course through the reality of what he'd known and when he'd known it. Despite everything—despite the falsehoods demanded by his own ersatz love life—Virgil doesn't actually like lying to his brothers. He prefers to do most of his lying purely by omission, and to remain on the technical side of the truth. As long as no one asks, he doesn't have to answer. Scott's asking now. Virgil's answer is carefully structured, qualified, and designed to provide information Scott hasn't actually asked for, hoping to soften some of the judgment raining down on his little brother.
"I mean—I knew they'd gotten together. That night…it was late, after the party. Everyone else had gone home, you and John were talking at the other end of the bar. Kayo and Parker were playing cards, Alan was playing with Sherbert. Lady P took off somewhere. And me and Gordon had a drink—he was already kinda tipsy, I guess, and there was a hell of a lot of champagne going around—you know how Penelope's parties are. And he told me he wanted to go find her and talk to her and just…like, you know how he's always felt about her. Feels about her. He just, he said he was gonna get it all out in the open and see what came of it. I don't think he ever expected—"
Scott cuts him off, clearly uninterested in any kind of nuance. "How drunk would she have to be to sleep with Gordon, though? D'you think…?"
This has gone in a different direction than Virgil intended, and he physically recoils from the suggestion, horrified by the implication on his little brother's behalf. "Scott—Jesus—that's absolutely not what happened. The pair of them didn't get sloppy drunk in a back hallway and have a halfway consensual hookup. It was later. Way later, after everyone had gone to bed. They both would've been sobering up, when—"
"So you did know about this?"
And abruptly Virgil flashes back to the wrong side of a closet door, and the way he'd had to go bolting out of Kayo's (his) bed and out of sight, as they'd heard someone fumbling with the lock on the door of the shared bathroom. The closets in the guest rooms of Creighton-Ward Manor are not large, and this one in particular had been stuffed with fur coats, musty with age and disuse. Virgil hadn't quite managed to pull the door quite all the way shut, and had to keep a hand locked on the handle to keep it from swinging back open. He'd stayed frozen in between the mink and the muskrat, listening intently as his brother had talked to Kayo instead of him. And Kayo's fine—and she'd handled it pretty well, all things considered—but she hadn't been who Gordon was looking for.
Virgil shouldn't have let that happen.
He remembers going to bed, and idly wondering how things had gone for Gordon, before there'd been a soft knock on his door, and it hadn't been his little brother. Kayo's arrival had banished all thoughts of anyone else's love life from even the remotest consideration, because what goes on between him and Kayo has always been fundamentally selfish. He hadn't remembered about Gordon until Gordon had come stumbling into the bedroom, looking for someone to talk to. Immediately after he'd left, he must have wound up with Penelope.
Virgil hadn't been there for him, then. He's got to make up for it now.
And while he's more than willing to try and cover for his little brother, but he hadn't actually intended to throw himself directly into the line of fire. There's a triumphant gleam in Scott's eyes beneath the golden pendant light above the bar, and one of his hands becomes a fist and thuds on the poured concrete countertop. Virgil's not bound by any kind of obligation to tell the truth, not by any means—but he knows he's bad at lying, and he's being mercilessly boxed into an uncomfortable corner, where he has to talk fast without fully considering what he's saying. "No…not…not when it actually must've happened. I—I mean, he told me, after, about how it'd all worked out. He said it went better than he could've hoped it would, and that him and Penelope were gonna give the whole thing a proper shot—they were gonna get together in Paris for his birthday—but I didn't know they'd slept together, he didn't ever tell me so. I wouldn't even have guessed, because Gordon's not like that about Penelope. I mean…I know how Gordon is. He sleeps around a bit, sure, and he always kinda has—but it's different with her. Scott, you know he's in love with her, right?"
Scott, apparently, doesn't consider this an excuse for anything, and just shakes his head, visibly disgusted by the claim. "You don't do this to someone you love. He's been an irresponsible, selfish little fucking idiot and now she's paying the price. There's no way in the world Penelope wants a kid right now. She's always said that getting involved with a member of our family would be a huge goddamn mistake, and look—she was right."
Virgil really wishes he could've known about this before Scott had. Defending Gordon in Gordon's absence feels like a duty—if Scott's decided he's going to be an asshole about this whole thing, then Virgil's got to step up his game and have his little brother's back—but he's growing slowly certain that it's going to have a personal cost. "I think we all need to take a minute and process this," he says, attempting a rational approach. "Obviously this isn't…it isn't great. But—"
"Yeah, no shit! "
Thunder overhead echoes Scott's outburst, and it becomes abruptly obvious that he's been restraining his anger about this. Virgil still doesn't entirely understand just why Scott's taking this so badly—theirs is a life where natural disasters are a common obstacle and unexpected curve balls are more or less par for the course—but his anger seems disproportionate to the situation. Virgil's concerns are about how Gordon is holding up, how Penelope had taken the news, whether she knows what she wants to do in this situation—Scott seems to be taking this more personally. Not as a problem to be dealt with, but almost like a deliberate insult.
Virgil tries to keep his tone calm and measured and even, trying very hard not to sound like he's patronizing his older brother. "Well, we'll just—we'll deal with it, Scott. We'll find a way to make it all work, and—"
Scott's in no mood to be placated, and if anything, Virgil's attempt to talk him down just fans the flames. He pushes away from the bar, starts to pace the floor as he continues, and it's almost like he's talking to himself as he declares, "It can't work. How the hell are we supposed to continue to have a working relationship with her? How the fuck is that supposed to happen, when there's this kind of personal baggage involved? He should've known better than to try and be with her in the first place; she never should've encouraged him. They can't be together, it doesn't work! They can't sustain this—IR can't sustain this! Our lives just aren't compatible with—"
"With what?" Virgil interrupts, surprising himself with the sudden heat in his voice, and Scott looks up at him sharply, freezing midstep and narrowing his eyes. "With any kind of relationship beyond the bounds of what you think IR can sustain? Since when are you the arbiter of what we do with our lives? Jesus Christ, Scott, do you hear yourself?"
Virgil's broadly considered to be a moderating influence on the rest of his family. Usually he's the one to back his brothers down from anger. But something about Scott's attitude is pushing all the wrong buttons, and Virgil feels his hands clench into fists around the handles of his crutches, as he glowers at his big brother. Unexpectedly, this actually shuts Scott up, and for a few moments he just stares across the bar at Virgil, apparently dumbfounded.
"You can't seriously be taking Gordon's side?"
The incredulity is insulting, and Virgil feels his temper flare even hotter in response. It's a rare, unfamiliar feeling, and some seldom called upon aspect of his personality might even relish it; the conviction of knowing he's in the right and fully entitled to come out swinging, to his little brother's defense. "There aren't sides! And if there were, you'd be on the wrong one! We spend day after day after day dealing with life-threatening fuck-ups and industrial strength accidents and actual world-altering disasters—and you're flipping your shit about this?"
Scott stares at him, and then repeats the truth that dominates the conversation, as though it needs to be said again, "He got our London Agent fucking pregnant!"
"And it's not the end of the goddamn world!" Virgil thunders, matching and then exceeding his brother for sheer volume as his voice rises with an unexpected swell of emotion. On the job, the quality and omnipresence of their comms mostly prohibits the need for shouting. Apparently shouting is something reserved for their personal lives. "It's just something that happened! And it sucks that it happened, obviously neither of them would've wanted this, obviously it complicates things—but for fuck's sake, Scott, get some perspective!"
The way Scott falls suddenly, dangerously silent is a warning—not of the sort of imminent violence of temper that had shattered a bottle of Dad's bourbon on the floor—but of the fact that he's retained control where Virgil's lost it. Virgil doesn't get angry often, and he's not used to the rush of adrenaline that goes along with righteous fury, not used to how easy it to get caught up and carried away. The worst of it is; he hasn't said anything that isn't true. Lying doesn't come naturally to Virgil, and he's the keeper of a great many of those carefully omitted truths. These are all clamouring at the back of his throat, hidden behind clenched teeth, and they start tripping and tumbling over each other as he really gets started.
"Since when is IR supposed to be all that matters?" he demands, and he tells himself he's thinking of what his brother must have wanted, tempted by the apparently forbidden prospect of getting to be with Penelope. He can't do anything nearly so dangerous as admit that he's speaking for himself, as much as Gordon. "Our entire family orders their entire lives around other people! We eat and we sleep and we work and we fly and now one of us might actually want something else, something more— Gordon loves somebody, and somebody loves Gordon—and you think whatever comes of that is gonna ruin everything? Is there any version of that statement that doesn't make you the bad guy? You think Dad would've reacted like this?"
Scott just stares at him, steely and cold. "You don't know what Dad would've said."
"I know he wouldn't have said anything that got a bottle of bourbon thrown at him!" Virgil shakes his head, reminding himself of what he knows about Gordon, and taking a few brutal stabs in the dark at what Scott could've said. "Did you tell him anything like what you've told me? Did you say they can't be together, did you say this was his fault? Did you say something about her? Because if you had even the first idea of the way Gordon really feels about Penelope, you'd know you're lucky he didn't punch your teeth down the back of your damn throat!"
Whatever format Scott had expected this encounter to take, clearly he wasn't expecting an argument. Not with Virgil. This is an advantage that Virgil rarely exploits—none of his brothers are accustomed to arguing with him, and it puts them all on the backfoot when he decides to take a confrontational stance. And so Scott flounders momentarily and while Virgil likes to think it's because he's made some cogent, rational points—really, Scott's just not used to being shouted at.
Still, he rallies. Some of the fire fades out of him, replaced by cold, imperious disdain. He glares right back at Virgil, and the bulk of the bar between them serves as a barrier between them, and the sides they've chosen. There's still half a puddle of bourbon gleaming on the floor behind him, and a sopping wet dish towel clenched in his fist drips onto the hardwood floor.
"This is going to ruin everything," he repeats, stubborn and certain and still blackly, deeply angry. "This is gonna tear IR apart, just you watch. Just you wait."
Virgil scoffs. "If IR can survive us losing our father; if IR can survive a legitimate goddamn supervillain with a vendetta; if IR can survive people trying to actually fucking kill us—then it can survive the fact that our brother might just have the nerve to care about something other than International fucking Rescue! Which is more than you've done since Dad died!"
This is the point where he should realize he's gone just a fraction too far.