WIN by Coben, Harlan (best book reader txt) 📕

to a constant internal battle to maintain the false narrative of somehow “deserving” all these riches, of being “worthy.” You push away the obvious truth—that fate and happenstance have more to do with your lot in life than your “brilliance” or “work ethic”—so as not to shatter your self-created myth.

But my father and those like him know the truth. Deep down. We all do. It haunts us. It makes us compensate. It poisons.

“On the news,” my father begins, “they said the Vermeer was found in a New York City apartment.”

“Yes.”

“And that the thief was found dead?”

“There is probably more than one thief,” I remind him. “But yes, he was murdered.”

“Do you know the man’s name?”

“Ry Strauss.”

We don’t stop short, but my father slows for a moment. His lips thin.

“Do you know him?” I ask.

“The name is familiar.”

I briefly explain about the Jane Street Six. He asks a few follow-up questions. We reach the entrance to Lockwood Manor. A woman is dusting in the parlor. When we come in, she vanishes without a word as she’s been trained to do. The indoor staff dress in a brown that matches the wood, the outdoor in a green that matches the lawn, both a camouflage of sorts created by my great-grandmother. The Lockwoods treat help well, but they are always just the help. When I was twelve years old, my father noticed one of our landscapers taking a break to look at the setting sun. My father pointed to the skyline and said to me, “Do you see how beautiful Lockwood is?”

“Yes, of course,” young me replied.

“So do they.” He gestured toward the landscaper. “That laborer gets to enjoy the same view we do. It isn’t different for him, is it? He sees the exact same thing you and I do—that same sunset, that same tree line. Yet does he appreciate that?”

I don’t think I realized at the time how utterly clueless my father was.

We are all masters of self-rationalization. We all seek ways to justify our narrative. We all twist that narrative to make ourselves more sympathetic. You do it too. If you are reading this, you were born in the top one percent of history’s population, no question about it. You’ve experienced luxuries that painfully few people in the history of mankind could have even imagined. Yet instead of appreciating that, instead of doing more to help those beneath us, we attack those who got even luckier for not doing enough.

It is human nature, of course. We don’t see our own faults. As Ellen Bolitar, Myron’s mother, likes to say, “The humpback never sees the hump in his own back.”

Nigel peeks in on us. “Do we need anything?”

“Just some privacy,” my father snaps. He says “privacy” with the short i, as though he’s suddenly British. Nigel rolls his eyes and gives my father a mock salute. To me, he glares a quick warning before closing the doors.

We sit across from one another in the red velvet chairs near the stone fireplace. My father offers me a cognac. I pass. He starts to pour his own, but his arm is slow and uncooperative. When I offer to help, he shakes me off. He can manage. It’s still early in the morning. You must think he has a drinking problem, but that’s not it; he just has nowhere else he needs to be.

“Your cousin Patricia was here with you,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She is a member of the family,” I say.

My father lances me with the blue eyes. “Please, Win, let’s not insult my intelligence. Your cousin hasn’t been to Lockwood in over twenty years, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And it isn’t a coincidence that the day the Vermeer is found she came back, is it?”

“It is not.”

“So I want to know why she was here.”

This is my father, the somewhat bullying interrogator. I haven’t experienced much of this side of him since his stroke. I’m glad to see his ire, even though it is aimed squarely at me. “There may be a connection,” I say, “between the art heist and what happened to her family.”

Dad’s eyes start blinking in astonishment. “What happened to her…?” His voice trails off. “You mean her abduction?”

“And Uncle Aldrich’s murder,” I add.

He winces at his brother’s name. We stay silent. He lifts the glass and stares at the amber liquid for far too long. “I don’t see how,” he says.

I stay still.

“The paintings were stolen before the murder, correct?”

I nod.

“A long time before, if I recall. Months? Years?”

“Months.”

“Yet you see a connection. Tell me why.”

I do not want to go into details, so I switch topics. “What caused the rift between you and Uncle Aldrich?”

His eyes flare at me from over the crystal. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You never told me.”

“Our…” He takes a moment to think of the word. “Our dissolution took place years before his murder.”

“I know.” I stare into his face. Most people claim that they cannot see family resemblances when it comes to themselves. I can. Almost too much. “Do you ever think about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you and Aldrich hadn’t”—I make quote marks with my fingers—“‘dissolved,’ do you think he would still be alive today?”

My father looks stunned, hurt. “My God, Win, what a thing to say.”

I realize that I’d wanted to draw blood—and apparently, I succeeded. “Do you ever think about that possibility?”

“Never,” he says too forcefully. “What has gotten into you?”

“He was my uncle.”

“And my brother.”

“And you threw him out of the family. I want to know why.”

“It was so long ago.”

He raises the glass to his lips, but now it is shaking. My father has gotten old, an obvious observation alas, but we are often told how aging is a gradual process. Perhaps that’s true, but in my father’s case, it was more like a plummet off a cliff. For a long time, my father clung to that beautiful edge—healthy, strong, vibrant—but once he slipped, his descent was steep and sudden.

“It was so long ago,” my father says again.

The pain in