Oro, Colorado
THE SLEDMAKER’S SHOP sat on the uninhabited south side of the Eureka River. Joe used his gloved hand to push snow off one windowpane, then scraped at ice beneath until he could see in.
An unfinished flyer lay upside down and runnerless on one side of the worktable. Kicksled parts hung from a pipe overhead. Boxed segments leaned against a wall. Saw and plane lay uncovered, shavings curling beneath four years’ worth of dust blanketing everything. For Joe it brought to mind Dickens’s Miss Havisham; the shop just needed a similarly cobwebbed female, waiting for the sledmaker’s return.
Stepping away from the shop, he dug into the snow with his poles as he made his way back along the river, over a track as yet uncleared of its fresh, still-falling snow. The afternoon turned dark blue, edging toward the dark of solstice and the year’s longest nights.
Lights from windows, Christmas lights on eaves and fences, sparkled across the river, making Oro come alive.
Only one house sat on this side—against dense trees and away from any avalanche path, which wouldn’t have been the case if the house had been built a few hundred yards to the east or west.
It was a cabin constructed in the Arts and Crafts style, possibly from a kit. It was handsome and undoubtedly warm, sound and practical. As well built as the sleds.
Although it was five-thirty, no lights burned in that house. A bank of windows glowed at the only other structure on this side of the river, the Gold Mountain Community Center, a ski-lodge type of building, steeply roofed with jutting decks. Cars were parked outside. Others drove up, their headlights illuminating the slow snowfall, as Joe shoed past, and he heard a dance band playing inside. He remembered a sign he’d seen that day at the tiny Oro Market. Oro Family Dance, All Welcome.
Curiosity drew him toward the building. He loosened and kicked off his snowshoes and carried them across the parking area, moving behind the blinking lights of a small plow clearing the lot.
A six-dollar cover charge, according to the sign outside.
And he was not a member of this community. He was an outsider.
A small boy, accompanied by a woman with short light-brown hair, attractive with the kind of health that enough money and leisure could provide, took his ten-dollar bill and carefully counted back four ones.
“Thank you,” Joe told him. “Well done.”
The boy grinned. Missing two front teeth.
The band, with a saxophone, lead and bass guitar, keyboards and percussion, called themselves The Montangnards. On the hardwood floor, a couple in their fifties two-stepped to a Beatles song, while a young and extremely striking blond woman danced with a boy who looked about five while holding a younger girl in her arms.
She was unmistakable.
The white-blond hair in two braids, the arched black eyebrows and heart-shaped face and deep red bow of a mouth, coloring from a fairy tale, all of her surprisingly small and powerful. Again he knew astonishment that she had loved and married Victor Knoll, a man twenty-five years her senior.
So those were two of the children. Where was the third? He thought he’d been told that the oldest child was a girl. He could not take his eyes off the woman. Envy, mingled with bitterness, stung his ever-suppurating injury, the wound Victor had so calmly dealt.
First, Teresa—the woman he loved—had loved Victor. Then this woman had. The sledmaker had not been, in Joe’s opinion, a handsome man. However, he’d been one of the most lovable, magnetic people Joe had ever known. Balding, beaky nose, a sense of humor, a smile like the sun, kind. He had married this woman, who was at the time perhaps all of twenty-three or twenty-four years old.
She had married him, and those were their children, two of them anyhow.
She owned his shop and the land on which it sat.
For a hard-felt, hard-swallowing moment, Joe wanted that shop and everything in it. He wanted everything he could get that had once been Victor’s.
A tall man with long jet-black hair joined her on the floor and began dancing with Sabine Knoll and her children. She gave him a look that was only polite, turning away and smiling at her son.
Joe had never met her. He hadn’t come here to have anything to do with Victor’s widow or his offspring—not really. Victor had been his brother, sixteen years older, and more like a father to him—once. Had Victor ever mentioned his younger brother and onetime business partner to Sabine? Impossible to say.
It didn’t occur to him to approach her then, and he definitely wasn’t asking her to dance. There was a time for everything.
This was the time for him to remember the reasons he’d come to Oro.
And all the reasons he hadn’t come, all the things he wasn’t here to do.
AGAINST SABINE’S SHOULDER, Tori said, “There’s Daddy.”
This had become an irritating trait of Tori’s. Victoria knew perfectly well that her father had died before she was born—as perfectly as an almost-four-year-old could understand the concept of death. I wish it was your daddy, Sabine thought, not even bothering to turn around to see who had inspired the remark this time.
Strange how someone could be gone for four years, and— It wasn’t precisely that she still mourned. But she knew perfectly well that Victor Knoll had been the love of her life and she was unlikely to love that way again.
“Daddy’s dead!” Finn yelled at his sister. “Stop being stupid! We don’t have a dad.”
Sabine said, “Be nice, Finn.” She hated refereeing between these two. Maria, the oldest, was uncommonly sane and mature for a nine-year-old. She’d always been an easy child. Finn and Tori were not easy. In fact, they seemed determined to present a picture to the world that suggested their mother could not raise them successfully without the help of the husband she’d lost. About once a week, Sabine asked her sister, Lucy, It’s me, isn’t it? I’m not strict enough, am I?
Her sister generally declined to give an opinion. And Lucy was hardly an authority on mothering.
Yes, Sabine missed Victor, and not just—or mostly—as the father of her children.
“It’s Daddy,” Tori insisted. “It’s Daddy in the picture.”
“What picture?” The band started another song, Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” Sabine peered into Tori’s small face, which had Victor’s brown eyes rather than her own blue ones. But Tori was pointing over Sabine’s shoulder, and Sabine turned with her daughter in her arms.
The man was staring at her. His expression was not that of a man admiring an attractive woman. It was different. Deliberate, yet without sexual meaning.
He was dark-haired, dark-skinned, with five o’clock shadow and the nose of an eagle. He reminded Sabine of black-and-white photographs of polar explorers—or the first men to climb Everest, though why she should romanticize those men she didn’t know. The family in which she’d grown up had been Himalayan mountaineers; from personal experience, she knew mountaineering to be something different from what the uninitiated perceived, both for the loved ones waiting at home and for the mountaineers themselves. Sabine had been both and—in a snow-buried, ice-locked part of herself—still was and always would be.
In any event, she’d never seen this man before, he bore no resemblance to Victor, and, as usual on this subject, she had no idea what Tori was talking about. Sometimes, when she was tired or annoyed, when ice had caked beside her car and one of the children fell, when she needed just one thing from the store and discovered it had closed three minutes earlier, when she’d been up shoveling at thirty degrees below zero since three in the morning, and Tori said something like this, Sabine almost believed her daughter did it to torment her, which was ridiculous.
But what she would give for one glimpse of Victor, even as a ghost.
And not be able to touch?
“That’s not your father,” she said matter-of-factly. Perhaps simply hearing the answer had been Tori’s objective. Like in the book Are You My Mother? Although Tori’s question was, Is that my daddy? A game.
It wasn’t a game Sabine enjoyed, nor did she particularly mind. If Maria had suddenly burst out, There’s Daddy! it would’ve been different. She was the only one of the children who had any real recollection of Victor. Probably Finn remembered a little—impressions.
But Tori wouldn’t know Victor if he walked into the Oro Community Center.
Sabine turned away from the stranger, trying not to remember, trying to remember, moments of jumping into Victor’s arms, wrapping her legs around him. Feeling so exquisitely loved and loving him, eager to make up for the long years of imprisonment in his previous marriage.
Except that Victor had always refused to consider himself a prisoner, just as he’d refused to turn his back on a situation everyone else had judged impossible and unworkable.
“In the picture!” Tori said again. “Daddy in the picture!”
What was she talking about? “Where’s Maria?” Sabine asked Finn, ignoring Tori’s outburst. “We should go home and bake those cookies, so they’ll be done by bedtime.”
“Yes,” Finn said.
“Mommy, look! He’s Daddy in the picture!”
“Quiet, Tori. Stop yelling.” Sabine put her down, unwilling to let her daughter shriek in her ear. Tori was getting louder by the minute. “It’s time to go home.” Others were just arriving.
“I want to see Aubrey!” Tori screamed.
“Tori, I am so not in the mood for this. If you want to stay until Aubrey gets here, you need to lower your voice and be pleasant. Do you want to dance?” Aubrey went to Tori’s preschool and was her favorite playmate.
Tori shook her head, brow furrowed, an expression of stubbornness crossing her features. She tugged on Sabine’s hand. “Mommy. Mommy.”
Sabine crouched down to hear her.
“In the picture.”
“What picture? Sweetie, tell me what picture you mean.”
“In the attic!”
The attic of the house Victor had built the year after they’d moved to Oro from Minnesota was now the children’s favorite play area. It had been Victor’s place at home, a den of sorts where he’d done some of the paperwork for the business. The rest of the family had always been welcome to join him. There was no part of Victor’s life that he had closed off from her.
He used to carry Maria and later Finn up into the attic with him. The children had sat on the floor looking through old issues of National Geographic, playing with wooden blocks he’d cut and finished for them or with Maria’s dollhouse, a Second Empire Victorian, like many of the homes in Oro; Victor had planned to wire it for electricity when Maria was older.
There were many pictures in the attic. After Victor had died, Sabine wished she’d taken the time to ask him to identify every single person in every single photo. She wished she’d asked more questions about his life before she’d met him.
But what had it mattered? She’d known the key parts, and she had simply wanted him back.
She supposed she still did, but accepted that it wasn’t possible.
He’d been only fifty-six when he died. That was nothing. Nothing. She’d counted on having him much longer—as though that would’ve made it easier when he finally died before she did. Ironically, he’d died in a way he probably wouldn’t have in old age—avalanche burial while cross-country skiing.
“Oh,” Sabine said. “He looks like someone in one of Daddy’s pictures?”
“Daddy,” Tori said again, in a tone that implied her mother was impossibly stupid.
Of course, Tori probably didn’t know which man in the pictures was her father. Tori had seen photos of Victor but not recently. “When we get home, you can show me. Believe me, Tori, the man over there is not your father.”
Tori’s bottom lip stuck out, but then she spotted someone on the opposite side of the room. Freeing herself from Sabine, she sprinted across the floor in her black patent leather shoes and black velvet dress, the Christmas dress she wouldn’t be able to wear for more than this one year. It had been Maria’s.
Finn said, “Mom, I want to go home and make cookies.”
“We’ll go soon. Aubrey just got here. We’ll stay for a little while so she and Tori can play.”
Maria, with her blond braids—flaxen blond, white-blond, like Sabine’s—came to join them. She wore a pair of sheepskin-lined pink suede boots that Sabine had bought secondhand, white corduroys and sweater, and a pale pink ski jacket.
I am lucky, Sabine reminded herself, as she often did. She was thirty-four years old, owner of her own house, mother of three beautiful children. Between the homespun yarns she sold in Oro’s shops during the summer, the two jobs she held during the same season—waiting tables, selling clothes for a Front Range designer—and her and Lucy’s winter snow-shoveling business, she made enough money to support herself and her children. They’d done better when Victor was alive and making sleds, but even alone she seemed to make a little more money each year. She could spin faster all the time, particularly with Maria carding the wool. Maria earned a percentage of the profits from each skein of yarn. Maria saved her money, too, and she had knit sections of the sweater she was wearing, made of white lambswool.
Yes, I’m lucky.
She was happy, and she’d known more love in the five years of her marriage to Victor than most people knew in a lifetime. And she had taken one lover since his death, but she regretted it. It had made her sadder than ever, as though she’d violated the sacredness of the love she’d shared with Victor by sleeping with a man who wasn’t his equal in any way.
Maria said, “Can we go?”
“In just a few minutes. After Aubrey and Tori have some time to play.”
It was seven o’clock when they reached home. Sabine lit a fire in the woodstove with Tori tugging on her leg, saying, “Mommy, come see the picture,” and Finn saying, “Can we make the cookies yet?”
Maria said, “I put on water for spaghetti, Mom,” which was the kind of thing Maria did.
“Thank you, Maria. I’m just running up to the attic with Tori.”
The framed picture hung on the wall beside the old desk Victor had used. He’d never bought anything new for himself, but had showered her with gifts and given generously to other people, too. No wonder Sabine hadn’t remembered the picture and Tori had. It hung slightly lower than Tori’s eye-level.
“That’s your daddy,” Sabine said, pointing to Victor. She didn’t know the identity of the other man—but Tori was right. The other man in the photo might be the same man they’d seen at the community center that night—though the photo showed a younger version. The man at the dance was in his forties, she guessed. The photo must be twenty years old.
Who was he?
It probably wasn’t the same man.
Yet Sabine remembered turning and finding his eyes on her with a predatory expression that didn’t seem to have anything to do with desire.
She studied the photo, studied Victor’s bright familiar smile. Back then, he’d had more hair, black that’d gone silver as he lost it. His smooth olive skin was like that of his companion, who was a bit taller and perhaps fifteen years younger.
Curious, Sabine took the photo off the wall.
“What are you doing, Mommy?” asked Tori.
“I want to see if Daddy wrote anything on the picture.”
The frame was inexpensive, the back easy to remove.
There it was, like pain. Victor’s familiar scrawl, his messy male writing. The sledmakers.
He’d had a partner in the business before she’d known him. Joe? Yes, that was his name. “I think that’s Joe,” she told Tori, reassembling the picture in the frame and pausing to study Victor’s eyes, that clear brown, like cognac, with a long thick fringe of lashes and whites whiter than snow. Her lover’s eyes. God, how she’d loved him—and still did, wherever he was.
His companion was brown-eyed, too, Sabine thought though she couldn’t be certain. Their mouths were similar, his and Victor’s. And their chins. Strong. Good chins.
What had Victor said about his business partner? Very little, as Sabine recalled. There’d been so many other things to talk about. He’d been immersed in caring for Teresa. What had happened to Teresa was so horrifying. And Sabine—at first all she’d been able to think about was the fact that Victor was married, married to Teresa.
With simple loyalty, he’d refused to leave his wife, refused to speak words of love to Sabine or to make any overtures toward her, always denying with his actions what she saw in his eyes. When she quit working for them, quit because temptation seemed too great, she had seen a brief dampness in his eyes that he quickly both hid and denied.
He had never cried in front of her. Ever.
Then, Teresa had died.
He could abandon the dead.
Finn came up to the attic, dressed as Blizzardman, a superhero he’d invented. Lucy had sewn a pale-silver satin snowflake onto the back of his white satin cape. “Can we make cookies yet?”
“Yes. We’ll start them. And dinner.”
She picked up Tori and carried her downstairs, following her superhero son. Finn had begun kindergarten this year, and it felt to Sabine that she’d had nothing but problems with him—and Oro’s tiny school—ever since. His teacher, who also taught the first-, second-and third-grade students, including Maria, did not want Finn wearing his cape to school, which he chose to do every day. But there was no rule against it, and Sabine was strongly in favor of capes, strongly in favor of a six-year-old boy who spent hours imagining himself gathering into the force of an avalanche or freezing villains with a look from his eyes. And Finn was a loner. He was different.
He had no father, and she believed he needed one. But nowhere could she find a man whom she could love and respect as she had loved and respected Victor.
The children were in bed when Lucy finally came in, flushed, the blue shell she wore over her other ski clothes steaming. Lucy was an ultrarunner and adventure racer. Sabine envied her the freedom of long workouts; her own often consisted of skiing while pulling Tori on a sled or dragging the children’s sleds up to the top of one or another of their favorite sledding hills—or, of course, shoveling, her main outlet for activity.
Lucy was Sabine’s height but of stockier build with a broad freckled face and the same white-blond hair as Sabine’s. She had once told Sabine that it was no fun being “the ugly one.” Sabine hadn’t known how to react, except to deny Lucy’s claim to ugliness. Now Lucy said, “I think we’ve got to get up on the Independence.”
The Hotel Independence, one of the buildings they’d contracted to shovel.
“I saw Mac at the rec center just now,” she continued, “and he said there’s three feet on the north side of the roof. By the way, he says there’s some guy in town asking questions about you and Victor.”
Sabine didn’t believe in coincidence.
It had to be the man she’d seen earlier that night, which meant that man must be Victor’s former partner, Joe.
“Like what?” She didn’t know why she shied from telling Lucy about Tori’s confusion; she probably didn’t want to admit that Tori couldn’t pick Victor out of a photograph.
“Mac thought he sounded interested in the shop.”
She didn’t say, Interested how? Interested in buying, undoubtedly.
“Don’t you want to sell?” asked Lucy. “This time, maybe?”
How odd to see her younger sister, twenty-nine, who hadn’t blanched at paddling some of the most dangerous rapids in the world, who had run a hundred miles through lightning and hail, who possessed Sabine’s own fearlessness in the mountains, quail at asking this question.
They had argued about it in the past.
Now Sabine just shrugged. What if the man Tori had noticed was Victor’s old partner? What if he did want to buy the business?
Later that night, when she finally lay down in the four-poster hickory bed Victor had made for the two of them, the bed in which he had finally come to her, finally become hers, Sabine again pictured the man standing on the edge of the dance floor. She remembered how, when she’d turned, he’d been staring at her. At them.
Had he heard Tori shriek that he was her daddy?
Sabine didn’t think so. She fell asleep wondering if the stranger was merely passing through and if he’d known Victor. If, by some chance, he was the mysterious “Joe” who’d made sleds with Victor twenty years earlier.
HE RETURNED to her house the next morning and saw that she was home. The chimney breathed wood smoke. A Subaru station wagon sat outside.
Joe parked his truck, a green Toyota with a camper shell and Alaska plates, on the snow-packed dirt street and switched off the engine. Was this the way to do it?
Why do it at all, any of it?
He’d come to Oro. He’d seen the shop. He’d seen the house. He’d seen Victor’s wife and children.
He’d even visited the cemetery and seen his grave.
He’d seen everything he’d come to see and done everything he’d come to do. He didn’t need absolution any more than Victor had.
And it was too late in any case.
But he did want something here, and what it was he couldn’t articulate. Years ago, he had lost something—many things. He wanted those things back, wanted himself unchanged by the events of that period, the period that had severed him from Victor. Other trials that had led to maturity he could easily accept. He had never expected a life without hardship.
But somehow, back in those weeks when things went so wrong, he had learned bitterness. He wasn’t sure he’d ever unlearned it, and he’d begun to believe his only hope for salvation lay in those faint cracks through which sentiment for Victor sometimes leaked.
The day had dawned icy with a wind blowing sleet. Now, at 10:00 a.m., the grayness remained.
She’d already shoveled her drive, he saw.
Or perhaps someone had shoveled it for her.
He couldn’t remember who had sent him the wedding photo. Not Victor. He’d learned about the children’s births from his aunt, who had lived across town from Victor and Teresa, then from Victor and Sabine, in the brief time they’d stayed in Minnesota after marrying.
She’s quite young, but they seem very happy, his aunt had written.
He’d pondered that clause often. She’s quite young. Why not, He’s old for her? Why not, There’s a twenty-five-year age difference? The blame, expressed this way, seemed to lie with Sabine.
His aunt had forgotten about Teresa, forgotten how she had come to be Victor’s wife, forgotten that Teresa had loved another man before Victor.
Joe, of course, never would.
The porch steps were swept of snow, as well. Yet everywhere, he saw prints of small boots and other evidence of children.
Two Nordic-style children’s kicksleds, undoubtedly made by Victor.
A Minnesota Flyer—that was what he and Victor had called the model when they’d built sleds together in Minnesota—leaned against the side of the house beneath the porch awning.
Did Sabine know what had happened to reduce Teresa to an idiot, something between vegetable and madwoman? She must have. It had been no secret.
Well, sleds weren’t inherently dangerous. But how had Victor felt about his children using them?
What had Victor really felt about anything?
Joe had believed he knew him. Once.
He felt little inclination to speak with Sabine, yet he’d seen the shop last night, and he’d made a decision. A decision to ask, and there was no one to ask about the shop but her.
He knocked on the door, his knuckles striking the wood beside the four small windowpanes.
After a few seconds, he heard soft footsteps inside. When she answered, he saw she was wearing mukluks, which had padded quietly over the hardwood floor. But what struck him, more forcibly than it had last night, was that she was beautiful.
It was one of life’s rules, he had once believed, that like inevitably mated with like. Yet several women had told him they loved Victor for his goodness and found him handsome because of that goodness.
One of life’s other rules was that women who looked like Sabine Knoll were shallow. Even when they appeared at first to be deep, their sorrows turned out to be of the kind that had been bred around their beauty.
Today her platinum hair was woven into one ropelike braid, but strands had come out, as though she’d been outdoors. Her eyebrows were surprisingly dark, yet delicately shaped. Her eyes reminded him of a fall sky.
He tried to read their expression. She’d seen him the night before. Had she recognized him from a photo? Perhaps. And if Victor had told her about him, that might be cause enough for trepidation.
Or wariness….
“Yes?” she said.
He decided to give away as little as possible until he could determine what she knew. “I’m looking for the widow of Victor Knoll.”
“I’m Sabine Knoll,” she said, opening the door wider. “My daughter actually thought she recognized you from a photo the other night. Did you know my husband?”
“Yes.” My whole life.
Her voice surprised him. It seemed mature, experienced, almost businesslike, issuing from a face and body profoundly young—and also, to his eye, both fragile and strong.
“Were you the Joe who was his partner for a while?”
Like that, she revealed how much she knew. And how little. Like that, his impression of her as mature, experienced and businesslike vanished. She was naive, unintelligent or both. “That’s me,” he said. “Joseph Thomas.” It was the wrong name and the right name. His father used to call him this; Victor occasionally had, too. First and middle name. What was to be gained, he wondered, from deceiving Sabine Knoll?
Satisfaction—a satisfaction that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with what Victor had done to him.
Revenge?
He wouldn’t have put it in such crude terms.
And revenge wasn’t precisely what he wanted.
More a leveling of things—an even score.
As though being loved by the woman a dead man had loved in life was equal to a guardian taking what had belonged to his ward. Not that Joe had been Victor’s ward at the time, or that Teresa had been a possession. But Joe had loved her.
She had learned—readily, as readily as people always did—to love Victor.
“Would you like to come in?” Sabine asked. “I have to pick up my daughter at preschool, but not for an hour.”
He wanted to warn her that she shouldn’t invite strangers inside, and the instinct shocked him. He wasn’t interested in protecting her. He had no concern for her at all, less than for any woman on earth.
That was bitterness, the indifference of the truly self-interested, speaking again, and he did not like himself for it, for his sudden intention to be nothing good in this woman’s life. It wasn’t why he’d come to Oro. And he hadn’t come to stay or even to linger. He’d come to look, to see, and to move on and quietly rebuild himself into an older version of someone he used to be and had lost along the road.
To create a better life.
The old life seduced, calling to him from halfway around the world. Climbing. Climbing was what had restored his manhood, permitting him to move beyond Victor and Teresa.
But had he really put it behind him? Ever?
“Thank you,” he told Victor’s widow, following her into the kitchen.
They sat at a maple table with four mismatched chairs, one holding a child’s booster chair. Before she sat down, she said, “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? Cookies?”
“No, thank you.”
So she sat and peered at him, waiting.
That impressed him, that she didn’t rush to fill the silence. He felt her wariness return, but he no longer worried that Victor had spoken of him.
“A friend of mine told me that Victor’s old shop is sitting equipped and unused. I went over and looked in the window.”
“Yes,” she said, the word slow as a breath.
“I wanted to ask if you’re interested in selling the business.”
“It’s hardly a business anymore. Not after four years. He had almost no sleds in stock. I’ve hung on to the last ones he made.”
The last ones he’d made were sitting in the shop gathering dust, as far as Joe could see.
“Other people,” she said, “have offered to buy the business. I—” Hesitation. “I’m protective of Victor’s vision for it.”
He didn’t ask her to describe that vision. He thought he could guess much of it, and he remembered some.
“And I don’t know why your partnership ended,” she added. “I can’t recall what he told me. It just seemed very much in the past.”
Gazing through the open arch into the next room, he saw, in a nook by the fireplace, three spinning wheels, baskets of wool, bobbins, other wooden spinning accoutrements, all in a happy and rustic disorder. It looked as though she’d been spinning when he knocked at the door. A hobby? What was important to her?
He wanted to know her.
He wanted to watch her with her children again.
His curiosity displeased him.
God, she was beautiful. She must have men beating down the door in this frozen town. However many single women Oro held, there couldn’t be another who looked like her.
She had fallen silent. She must want an explanation for why his partnership with Victor had ended.
You asked if she wants to sell the shop, after telling her the one lie she’ll find out if, for some reason, you decide to buy it. He’d given her the wrong name.
The only thing to do was to artfully back out of that lie, to escape what he’d already said by uttering a soulbaring truth.
At least part of it.
He stared at the cabinet. “I didn’t know what to expect when I came here. I introduced myself as Joseph Thomas, and I think I misled you.” As Victor did. “My name is Joseph Thomas Knoll. I wasn’t just Victor’s business partner. I’m his brother.”