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I think of warm blood on the hot highway, screaming children and the sound of flesh against fists. “I don’t see how.”

“You know I don’t condescend, so take this as it’s meant; you will understand when you’re older.”

“Oh, c’mon. Really, Dad?”

“It’s not that you’re not smart enough to get it, and you know I respect you,” he goes on. “It’s because you haven’t been alive long enough to make any really big mistakes.”

He doesn’t know that I had illicit drugs in my bedroom over the weekend, and I decide not to inform him.

“Really big mistakes,” Dad repeats, hitting down hard. “I know that we’ve raised you in a certain way—some things are good, and some things are bad, and you identify them as such. But the world isn’t black-and-white, Lydia. The more experience you have moving through life, you’ll see that most situations have fuzzy edges and gray areas.”

“So it’s okay to haul someone out into the street and pulverize their jaw?” I ask.

“It’s not, and it never will be,” Dad says, shaking his head. “The action is wrong. But the person committing it is a breathing, thinking, living, feeling human being. And I can tell you that most of the time where there’s violence, there’s fear—and it’s not only being felt by the victim.”

“Lytle was scared he was going to lose his son. I’ll give you that,” I say. “But did he have the right to batter Lawrence Horvath and traumatize a bus full of kids?”

“Eight kids,” Dad corrects, the defense lawyer kicking in.

“Nine,” I shoot back, and he concedes the fact with a nod.

“No,” he admits. “Lytle didn’t have the right, but he did have a reason. It’s my job to convince the jury that extenuating circumstances drove him to behave in a way that he normally wouldn’t. Trust me, Abe Lytle is not a bad person. Good people can do terrible things, Lydia. The longer you live, the more you see it. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

A silence settles over us as I digest that. Freshman year MacKenzie had let Brian Phillabrant go up her shirt in the back of the band bus on the way home from a football game. That was a Friday night, and everybody knew about it by Saturday morning. MacKenzie had lain facedown on my bed, her tears soaking my duvet as she moaned about her romantic exploits being fodder for the town gossip mill. Her mother had even heard about it, and Josephine had called the band director, insisting that he make sure she sat with me for the rest of the season.

Mortified, MacKenzie had bewailed her fate, and I had reminded her that we live in Henley. “If you’re thinking about doing something you wouldn’t want your mother to know about, you probably shouldn’t do it,” I had archly informed her.

“Welcome to the world of moral quandaries,” Dad says, smiling at me when I glance up. “Also, you’d make a horrible poker player. Everything you think is on your face.”

“Your pizza is on your face,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, but there’s still a heaviness on my chest.

“I know that right and wrong aren’t always that easy to define,” I admit. “I just need to figure out how to decode that area in between.”

Dad snorts. “Your grandpa had a really easy way of explaining it.”

“How’s that?” I ask.

“‘You can be wrong, or you can be a Chass,’” Dad says, his eyes going hard in the firelight, his mouth tight.

Grandpa Chass died last year, and while the line at the funeral home was long, most of the eyes were dry. He hadn’t been a mean man—just a hard one. One of my first memories of him was at my own fourth birthday party. He said that I could have cake or ice cream but not both. I’d told him that it was my birthday, and I would do what I wanted. We’d sat across from each other at the table, stuck in a stare-down as a bowl of ice cream grew warm in front of me, the candle on the cake next to it burning down. He waited for me to make my decision so that he could pull the other away. I waited for him to fold. Mom said the only thing that ended the standoff was that we both eventually took a nap. She found us that way, him leaning sideways in his chair, snoring, me facedown on the table, strands of my hair floating in the melted ice cream, the birthday candle a puddle of wax on top of the cake.

She’s always told it as a funny story, a little anecdote to illustrate the Chass personality. But now, looking at Dad in the firelight, I have to wonder what it was like to sit across from Grandpa every day and to be told that he could be wrong—or he could be a Chass. I’ve always felt the pressure to do the right thing, but I also feel the supportive love that underpins it, the unspoken understanding that I am human, I will make mistakes, and they will love me anyway. I don’t know if Dad ever had that, and maybe that’s why he works so hard to defend people who mess up . . . even if their mistakes fall more into the category of assault with a deadly weapon.

I think about the Chass gravestones at the cemetery, the angel looking down over Grandpa’s grave, her molded stone tears held in place for eternity, as a substitute for real tears of mourning that did not fall at the funeral. I’d stared that man down as a small child, the steel inside of me reflected back in his gray eyes. Mom’s laughter had always been shaky after she told the story, and included a sideways glance at me that I could never quite interpret. Bristal had mentioned me kicking Lyle Hunter in kindergarten as a reminder that I’m not the wilting flower everyone thinks, and my subtle maneuvering of Bailey Foxglove had only confirmed to her that I am not averse to pulling any strings necessary in order to win. I have to wonder—is that wariness buried in Mom’s side-eye? A quick check-in to see just how deeply the Chass steel is embedded in me—and how far I’ll go to get what I want?

“When you and Mom say I’m just like Grandpa, it’s never meant as a compliment,” I tell him. “But he was a Chass, all the way. Why did he get to step on toes, but I’ve got to play pin the smile on your daughter?”

“Fair question,” Dad says. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but there’s this thing called sexism—”

“Yeah, I’m aware,” I say, tossing a wadded-up napkin at Dad. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

Mom’s headlights swing across the driveway, and we both shift in our chairs, easing the tension that had developed.

“Save me from your mother and destroy the evidence like a good daughter, okay?” he asks, tossing me his beer bottle.

“If by destroy you mean recycle, I’ve got you. But she’s going to smell it on your breath.”

“Not if hers is worse,” he says, giving my hair a tug as he walks past me.