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There his compass held a true north.

To Ehlena’s surprise? It wasn’t all suffering for him. Before he had fallen ill, he’d been a litigator in matters of the Old Law, a male well-known for his affection for debate and his lust for strong opponents. In his illness, he found just the kind of conflict he had enjoyed while sane. The voices in his own head, as he put it with self-actualized irony, were every bit as intelligent and facile at debate as he was. To him, his violent episodes were nothing more than the mental equivalent of a good boxing match, and since he always came out of them eventually, he always felt victorious.

He was also aware he was never leaving the forest. It was, as he said in the final line of the book, his last address before he went unto the Fade. And his only regret was that there was room for just one inhabitant in there—that his sojourn among the monkeys meant he could not be with her, his daughter.

He was saddened by the separation and the burden he was on her.

He knew he was a lot to handle. He was aware of the sacrifices. He mourned her loneliness.

It was everything she had wanted to hear him say, and as she held the pages, it didn’t matter that it was all written and not voiced. If anything it was better this way because she could read it over and over again.

Her father knew so much more than she thought.

And he was far more content than she ever could have guessed.

She smoothed her palm over the first page. The handwriting, which was in blue, because a properly trained attorney never wrote in black, was as neat and orderly as the recitation of the past, and as elegant and graceful as the larger conclusions he drew and the insights he offered.

God…for so long, she had lived around him, but now she knew what he lived in.

And all people were like him, weren’t they. Each in their own rain forests, alone no matter how many folk walked beside them.

Was mental health just a matter of having fewer monkeys? Maybe the same number, only nice ones?

The muffled sound of a cell phone going off brought her head up. Reaching across to her coat, she took the thing out of her pocket and answered it.

“Hello?” She knew in the silence who it was. “Rehvenge?”

“You got fired.”

Ehlena put her elbow on the table and covered her forehead with her hand. “I’m fine. About to go to sleep. And you?”

“It was because of the pills you brought me, wasn’t it.”

“Dinner was really good. Cottage cheese and carrot sticks—”

“Stop it,” he barked.

She dropped her arm and frowned. “I beg your pardon.”

“Why did you do it, Ehlena? Why the hell—”

“Okay, you’re going to rethink your tone or this conversation’s getting the end button.”

“Ehlena, you need that job.”

“Don’t tell me what I need.”

He cursed some. Cursed some more.

“You know,” she muttered, “if I add a sound track and some machine guns to this, we’d have a Die Hard movie. How did you find out, anyway?”

“My mother passed.”

Ehlena gasped. “Wha…? Oh, my God, when? I mean, I’m sorry—”

“About a half hour ago.”

She slowly shook her head. “Rehvenge, I’m so sorry.”

“I called the clinic to…make arrangements.” He exhaled with the kind of exhaustion she was feeling. “Anyway…yeah. You never texted me that you’d gotten to the clinic safely. So I asked, and there it was.”

“Damn it, I meant to but…” Well, she was busy getting fired.

“But that wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to call now.”

“No?”

“I just…I needed to hear your voice.”

Ehlena took a deep breath, her eyes locking on the lines of her father’s handwriting. She thought of all she had learned, good and bad, in those pages.

“Funny,” she said, “I feel the same way tonight.”

“Really? Like…for real?”

“Absolutely, positively…yes.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Wrath was in a bad mood, and he knew this because the sound of the doggen waxing the wooden balustrade at the top of the main staircase was making him want to light the whole fucking mansion on fire.

Beth was on his mind. Which explained why as he sat behind