The last time Mason had seen Blaine Martin—alive, anyway—he was guiding Angie down the hallway with his hand on her lower back and his lips to her ear. Had he stepped up right then and there, his wife would still be alive. He hadn’t recognized the threat, or maybe he’d simply chosen not to. He’d just been so certain that he and Angie would be able to work out their problems. Never once had he so much as considered the idea of her straying, but he had to accept his own culpability. He found it easy to hate the special prosecutor, even easier to hate himself. After all, Martin was the monster of his own creation.
He was one of those guys who radiated confidence from his veneers to his just-so tan to his every-hair-in-place style. In so many ways, he was both like Mason and not. He was the Mason of a different time line, one in which he finished law school instead of dropping out to join the FBI. The Mason who opted for the BMW over the Grand Cherokee. The Mason who wore Brooks Brothers suits rather than jeans and a T-shirt. And apparently the Mason his wife had wished he could have been. And for the life of him, he couldn’t fault her for it. He brought nothing but grief to those who loved him, and over the past few years he had spent nearly as much time graveside as Death himself.
He watched Martin’s funeral from a distance, concealed behind the branches of a weeping willow. He recognized a handful of people, most of whom he’d met through his wife, and watched without feeling anything as Martin’s parents and a woman in her mid-thirties openly grieved. Had anyone asked him why he was there, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with a single reason. Maybe a part of him wanted to see the kind of world into which his wife had been lured, a world in which she would ultimately have been safe from the demons that walked in his shadow.
By the time Martin’s parents said their good-byes and the woman Mason assumed was his wife had fallen to her knees beside the hole, he felt like a voyeur.
His wife’s funeral was a different story. He’d felt the weight of every single pair of eyes of those in attendance boring through him. No one knew what to say to him, which was fine, considering he wouldn’t have known how to respond. Everyone was well aware of how she’d died. Despite his alibi, he could see in their eyes that they weren’t entirely convinced he hadn’t been party to her death. After all, were their roles reversed, each and every one of them knew they’d at least contemplate the notion of exacting a measure of revenge. What it all came down to was that he had turned into an object of pity in their eyes, a man who hadn’t been husband enough for his wife or good enough at his job to keep her out of harm’s reach. To keep her alive. He was a failure on every level. And it was human nature to treat failure like a disease.
Angie’s mother, who’d moved to an estate in Palm Springs several years prior as something of a trial separation, had made an effort to be cordial, but her father hadn’t even been able to look at him. He’d simply stared at the closed casket and then at her grave with an almost impassive expression on his face, as though his inner being had checked out and left only his physical vessel in attendance. The one time Mason met his stare, it was as though his father-in-law didn’t even see him, which he considered a blessing. He was sorry the man had lost his daughter, but he wasn’t sure if he could convey that without allowing a hint of anger to enter his voice. It wasn’t like they’d ever been especially close, anyway.
Paul Thornton wasn’t the kind of man who went out of his way to welcome a guy into the fold. He was the patriarch of the Thornton family empire and still managed the day-to-day operations and the corporate assets, despite rapidly approaching the age when men of his stature started looking forward to honing their golf swings and, in his case, to Angie’s older brother Victor taking the reins. Paul’s grandfather, Wesley Thornton, had grown the business from the chief supplier of beef in the state to one of the three largest meat producers in the country, mainly by ruining the competition, seizing their land, and paying the right people to be looking the other way while he did so.
His son and Angie’s grandfather, Francis “Frank” Thornton, had diversified into corn, wheat, and various grains and turned a multimillion-dollar cattle ranch into a billion-dollar agricultural empire. While Frank still dabbled in the business from the comfort of his motorized wheelchair, Paul had been CEO of AgrAmerica and the public figurehead since long before Mason even met him. Considering the levels of success his predecessors had achieved, there seemed to be little more he could do than maintain the status quo, but Paul wasn’t the kind to just sit on his inheritance. He gambled—and gambled in a huge way—on genetically engineered crops and led the charge in pioneering the use of hormones and steroids in livestock.
A part of him had always thought that Angie would eventually bring her financial acumen back to the family business. More than that, though, he was proud of his daughter for going her own way and not simply accepting the crown. Probably the only reason he’d allowed Mason to marry his daughter, at least in his own mind, was because Mason came from enough money that Paul could be confident he wasn’t after his. Plus, Mason’s relationship with Angie could potentially be used to curry favor with his father, a United States senator, who sat on any number of agricultural committees and chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Before Paul headed back to his waiting limousine, he’d shaken Mason’s hand, opened his mouth as though about to say something, then simply nodded and walked away.
Mason’s own father, the esteemed J. R. Mason, had stood beside him through the whole process. He’d taken care all the arrangements for him. Or, more likely, had one of his staffers do so for him. Either way, Mason appreciated it. His old man had even returned from Washington for the entire week, which might not have sounded like much, but for his father, it was a grand gesture of support. He wasn’t one of those touchy-feely guys who did things like express his emotions, participate in any kind of physical displays of affection, or acknowledge the existence of anyone or anything outside himself, for that matter, but he’d been there when Mason needed him and allowed him plenty of space when he didn’t, for which he was grateful.
All he’d really needed was his father’s presence beside him. In the pew at the church, at the graveside, and in the limo on the way home. They both knew what his father thought about the choices he’d made in life. The great and mighty J. R. Mason made no secret of his disappointment in the path his son had chosen, a different path from the one he and his father—and even his before that—had walked. A different path from the one he had plotted out for Mason.