Then Trent asked the question Joseph had been expecting.
“How did you do it? On the lawn. You barely moved.”
Joseph thought of a younger version of himself, proud of speed and skill, convinced that the ability to act made every difficult situation simpler.
“A lot of training,” he said.
“I mean, you could’ve hurt me.”
“Yes.”
Trent looked up.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you stopped being a threat before you stopped being a person.”
The younger man stood very still.
Joseph wasn’t trying to deliver a lesson that would live forever in a viral caption. He was answering the question truthfully. In his old life, there had been times when a single decision determined whether another person lived or died. He had spent too many years carrying those decisions to turn a neighborhood argument into another one.
“Being good at something dangerous is a responsibility,” he said. “It isn’t permission.”
Trent nodded slowly.
“Coach Price says something like that.”
“Listen to him.”
They shook hands. It was a brief handshake, not a reconciliation ceremony.
At the doorway, Trent turned back.
“Can I ever apologize to your daughter?”
Joseph considered it.
“You can write her a letter. I’ll give her the choice to read it or not. Don’t ask for anything back.”
“Okay.”
Khloe read the letter two weeks later. It was three handwritten pages, most of them awkward. Trent described the bottle, the lies, and the way he’d let his father convince him that being laughed at was worse than hurting somebody. He didn’t ask Khloe to forgive him.
She folded the pages and put them in a drawer.
“What do you think?” Joseph asked.
“I think he meant it,” she said.
“And?”
“I don’t want to talk to him yet.”
“Then you don’t have to.”
She leaned against the kitchen counter, where a pot of soup was simmering.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“If you hadn’t known how to stop him, what would you have done?”
Joseph turned off the stove.
“Moved away. Called for help. Kept you safe as best I could. There isn’t only one way to protect somebody.”
