“Yes, that would follow.”
“So the significance of the few secrets still being kept from you would also be increasing throughout this time?”
“Yes.”
“These secrets would currently include the reasons for my visit, or Dejah Shapiro’s, or for the Khaajiir’s long stay, or for the involvement of your siblings Jason and Jelaine?”
“Yes.”
I excused myself, went to the bathroom, poured myself a glass of water, and downed it to the dregs before returning. When I came back, he was still where I’d left him, neither his position, nor Vernon Wethers’s, having moved a millimeter. It was impossible not to wonder how many strings bound these two men, and how many misdeeds they’d plotted in rooms as luxurious as this one.
I smiled at him. Like most of my smiles, it was not meant to be a pleasant one. “A number of years ago Jason went missing.”
“That’s common knowledge,” Philip said.
“He returned after what are alleged to have been hellish experiences on a crumbling wheelworld called Deriflys, and was welcomed back into the bosom of his family. How did you feel about that?”
The question didn’t surprise him, but the color rose in his cheeks, and his eyes blasted me with still-gathering heat of his resentment. “How do you think I felt about that? He’s my brother. I was older, and had a different mother, so I hadn’t spent as much time with him while he was growing up as Jelaine and some of the children closer to his own age, but he was still important to me. Nobody was happier than me when Jelaine was able to straighten him out, and he was able to find some purpose in his life.”
“It didn’t bother you that he’d been welcomed back when you’d been a loyal, dependable son all along?”
More anger. “Maybe it would have, if I’d been a selfish brat insecure about my own place in the family’s affections.”
“And were you?”
“Which, a selfish brat or insecure in my family’s affections? I’ll cop to the first, at least sometimes; it’s an occupational hazard of being wealthy. But never to the second.”
“There was no question of jealousy?”
He rolled his eyes, spared a do-you-believe-this-bitch look for the impassive Wethers, and then faced me again. “There it is. The most noxious cliché ever concocted about wealthy families. The siblings are always corrupt caricatures, sniping at each other as they jockey for favor. The parents are always malignant, domineering old farts, emitting a constant barrage of slicing remarks as they threaten to exclude the unfit among their offspring. Is that how you like to picture us, Counselor?” He snorted. “Unfortunately for your preconceptions, that’s never been true of the Bettelhines. Whatever you may think of the way my family treats other people, we’ve always cared for our own.”
“So no sibling rivalry.”
“None? Please. We’re human. Just none of the kind you’re positing.”
“Not even when you lost Jelaine?”
He scowled. “I haven’t lost Jelaine.”
“True,” I allowed, “but Jason and Jelaine appear to be a closed unit that excludes you, not just from whatever they’ve been doing with your father and the Khaajiir, and not just from the business divisions they’ve been able to wrest from you, but also from any emotional connection to them as siblings. They don’t seem to hate you. They just don’t seem to have need of your presence. Are you going to claim that doesn’t bother you, either?”
I almost expected him to deny that as well, and for a moment he seemed about to, but then he glanced at Wethers again, and exhaled a lungful of hoarded breath. “No. I won’t claim that. I resent the hell out of it. Are you satisfied?”
“How did it happen, Mr, Bettelhine?”
He was angry again, but not at me. “I’m not sure that any of this is your goddamn business, Counselor, and we’ll have to talk about making sure you don’t take it anywhere outside this room, but when Jason returned from that place, he was not quite right. Oh, sure, he said the things he was expected to say, and did the things he was expected to do, and even managed to charm the eligible ladies when our parents threw a weekend ball in his honor, but he never really reconnected with us or with the life he’d thrown away. He was just playacting, giving us what he thought we wanted from him, and though it was goddamned convincing much of the time, we couldn’t spend time in his presence without seeing the look that came into his eyes whenever he thought we weren’t watching. I still don’t know everything that happened to him, during those years—it’s one of the many things he hasn’t seen fit to share with me—but I can tell you that we all knew it was still happening. I thought the family was going to lose him again, one way or the other.”
“And then?”
“One day after that ball I told you about, which is best described as a restrained disaster, Jelaine told me she’d made arrangements with Father to let her take Jason on an extended tour offworld. She said there were things Jason needed to deal with, leftover business from his days away. She said she was going to make sure he got the chance. Now, me, I absolutely hated the idea, since leaving Xana the first time had been such a disaster for him, but Jelaine seemed sure, and she’d already gotten Father’s approval, so it was going to happen, one way or the other.”
“Did you ask your father why he’d said yes?”
“He told me he wanted his son back.”
“And you?”
“I wanted my brother back.”
“But you were still against the idea.”
“I considered Jason toxic,” Philip said. “I’d seen him, a favorite son, flit off and subject himself to horrors the rest of us couldn’t even imagine. I saw him come back a shell of himself, not connecting with us or with anything around him. And now I saw him sucking Jelaine in too. Don’t you see? I was afraid of losing her too!”
“How did you deal with that?”
“Since I couldn’t stop them from going, I offered to jettison my responsibilities and come along. I said it was to help support Jason, but by then I didn’t think anything could help Jason. I was more interested in being the voice of reason, standing between him and Jelaine. But Jelaine said no. She said she knew what she was doing. She said I should trust her. And so I did what a brother does. I let her go and hoped for the best.”
“And is…‘the best’… what you got?”
He clenched his fists, opened them, then massaged each hand with the other, as if subconsciously washing them. “When they returned, Jason was a new man, centered, secure in himself, and content in a way he never had been before. Jelaine was different too. She’d always been a fine girl on her way to becoming a remarkable woman, but she’d become…there’s no other way of saying it…a lady. Royalty, really.”
“And why would this make you so unhappy?”
“They were cooler to me. They talked to me and asked me how I was and even congratulated me on my marriage and on the birth of my daughter. They were not unfriendly. But somehow, their relationship with me was no longer something they wanted, but something they felt they were obligated to have.”
“They don’t love you anymore.”
“I don’t know if they love me or not. That’s the damnable thing. But if they do it’s just because I’m their brother and they have to. Aside from that, they started treating me as an obstacle to be handled. As part of the problem.”
“Part of what problem?”
“I don’t know! Part of whatever fucking problem they have! Excuse me.”
Now it was his turn to retreat to the bathroom. He closed the door, ran the water, and returned with another glass, filled only halfway. His sips were tiny, and controlled, but furious. He wasn’t crying—I don’t know if he was capable of it—but his eyes were glazed, and his hands trembling. The man was a captain of industry, one of the wealthiest human beings in the universe, and by dint of the business he supported quite possibly a sociopathic monster, but at this moment he was just a boy, upset that his siblings had excluded him from their secret club.