Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
It had been his job to be suspicious of the young man from the police department that had been paying court to his daughter.
It was not that he was being snobbish (all appearances to the contrary). He would have regarded anyone from an engineer to a shop clerk with the same level of vague disapproval until further attention confirmed or mitigated the initial assessment. It had not mattered to him that his only daughter was a grown woman who lived on her own and had displayed enough intelligence and initiative to achieve a doctorate degree. He had still been her father - it was completely inappropriate for a man interested in pursuing her to think that she was without protections.
He had been told many times that it was an archaic practice or even some sort of an insult to his child's independence to view the situation in such terms, but he did not trouble himself with the opinions and inaccuracies of those predisposed and determined to willfully misunderstand the situation. His daughter was precious - anyone thinking of winning her approval was to understand from the first that any behavior that caused her injury would be met with consequences. This was the natural order of things, and the man in question (any man in question) would not be allowed to bypass any of those safeguards.
Elisabeth might have clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes behind his back as if she was only humoring him, but his insistence on a series of one on one interviews had been adhered to with a minimum of grumbling within his hearing. The man had seemed sincere in his regard - a fact that was tallied in his favor. His clearly unrehearsed words that awkwardly tried to express the idea that he knew he was outclassed had been equally acceptable.
There was, however, one glaring item in the course of his observations that had prevented him from ever warming up to him more than a basic (and admittedly grudging) resignation. The man was unfailingly impulsive. It was one of those character traits that could be an asset or a detriment dependent rather more on the circumstances surrounding than on the attribute itself. He did not like that.
Being impulsive had the potential to get someone in his position killed. He had, after all, made his daughter's acquaintance in an emergency room. Charm and grand gestures did little to make up for being left a widow young with the possibility of children to raise on one's own, but neither of them had seemed to be thinking through the situation in such a way. His normally careful planning daughter had gotten what they called "swept up." Jim did not seem to have a predisposition toward long term thinking in the first place. Level headedness and practicality had not been the order of the day.
Consequently, he had never trusted James Shannon.
His daughter thought she knew why. They had had involved discussions on the matter at one point that was not so very long ago in the grand scheme of things. She was incorrect in her assumptions on the matter.
There were many reasons for him to be wary of the man, but his mistrust, ultimately, came from one very simple place.
James Shannon was the sort who would always do what he thought was the right thing to do in any given moment. That was not an inherently bad quality. One could even make the case that there was something admirable about it from a completely objective standpoint. He, of course, was not completely or even marginally objective. He was, instead, very firmly in the position of knowing that his only child was the first person in line to have to deal with the consequences and repercussions of those in the moment decisions when their lack of forethought or planning or the ripples into the bigger picture came into play. He had always known that there would eventually be something that left Elisabeth picking up the pieces in the fallout.
It turned out that he had been correct in that assessment. He took no pleasure in that fact. He would much rather have been wrong.
He resented that they had locked him out of the family loop. He did not think it reasonable that they would expect him to feel any other way about it. They had shut him out as if he was untrustworthy. There had been no explanation as to why visits were suddenly an unacceptable practice or why his access to his grandchildren had been relegated to text only messages. He was not even allowed the video chat that had been a staple of their relationship up until that time.
He was hurt, and he did not believe that any reasonable, thinking person could fault him for that.
He could not even ask them what they had been thinking. Contact with his daughter was prohibited per the terms of the agreement. An agreement, he might add, that they were lucky to get at all given the circumstances. There were ways to handle these things to mitigate the damage, but those had all been blatantly ignored in typical bull in a china shop Jim Shannon fashion.
Where was the man now? He was holed up in a prison cell sitting on his backside while Elisabeth would work herself into the ground trying to keep herself and two children going on what was left of a salary being garnished to cover the fines imposed post their hearing. He could not help with that either - another of the restrictions of the agreement.
Josh and Maddy would be allowed to contact him, if they so chose, after they were eighteen years of age and could prove residency apart from their mother.
He would never speak to Elisabeth again. He had given that up in order to bail the family out of at least part of the troubles they had created. He shifted the blanket so that it covered his granddaughter more fully and brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.
She had cried herself to sleep again. She had had far more turmoil than a toddler could reasonably be expected to handle. She was not even comforted by the fact that she was with family because she had no idea that he was anything other than yet another stranger. What had they been thinking with all of their short sightedness? He was never going to be able to ask them if they even knew.