Instinctively I brace myself for what’s to come. He and I have been playing the same game for a while now. He sends a dumpy caregiver my way; I snarl and throw things and curse until she leaves. Repeat.

After the first round, I got a pissed-off email from him. The second woman I ran off warranted a phone call. By the fourth, my father had actually visited, issued a couple of warnings, and left the same day.

Then the fifth caregiver showed up—a man that time—and I ran him off too. I got an email and a phone call after that one.

And so it went. It’s nothing but a ridiculous game we play, all so he can pretend that he gives a shit.

This time, however, I sense a change in the rules, and I brace for it. It’s taken twenty-four years, but I’ve finally started to figure my dad out. Instinct tells me he’s about to switch tactics.

I take another sip of my drink—a big one—and slump further into the chair, letting him know that no matter what he throws at me, nothing will change. Nothing can change.

“You get one more shot,” he says.

I don’t bother to disguise my snort. I was expecting better from him. “Isn’t that what you told me last time? And the time before?”

He moves faster than I thought a seventy-one-year-old could, and snatches the whisky out of my hand. I glance up in surprise. The amber liquid’s all over his hand and on the rug, but he doesn’t seem to register it, because he’s too busy looking at me like he hates me.

Bring it on. I hate me too.

“I mean it, Paul. This is your last chance to show me that you have any desire to continue with your life. Any desire at all to get your agility back, to learn to cope with your physical changes. I understand why you wanted to hide at first, but it’s been over two years. You’re done. You get six more months to get your shit together.”

“Or what?” I ask, pushing myself to my feet and loving that the injury hasn’t taken away the fact that I’m still a few inches taller than him.

“Or you’re out.”

I blink. “What do you mean, I’m out?”

“Out of this house.”

“But I live here,” I say, not quite understanding where he’s going with this.

“Yeah? You paying the mortgage? Or the utilities? Did you build the gym exactly as the physical therapist specified, or was that me?”

I grind my teeth through my dad’s sarcasm. It was my dad’s idea to move me into a luxury home, not mine, and it shows how little he knows me. If he thinks kicking me out of the cushy mansion would mean anything to me, he’s dead wrong.

He’s got an expectant look on his face, as though he thinks I’ll go along with his little plan so I can sit here in opulence and drink overpriced booze.

I feel a little surge of satisfaction that he’s about to be disappointed.

“Fine,” I say, deliberately letting my tone go careless. “I’ll move out.”

He blinks a little in surprise. “To where?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

And I will. I don’t have much money to my name. I know that. But between the disability compensation I get as a veteran and my smallish savings account, I can get a little cabin somewhere.

My dad’s eyes narrow. “What about groceries? Clothes? Essentials?”

I shrug. “I don’t need gourmet shit and designer clothes.”

My eyes catch on the label of expensive whisky on the sideboard, but I don’t feel even the smallest pang of regret that it’ll soon be out of my budget. I’m in it for the numbness, not the taste. Cheap booze will do the trick just as well.

“And your precious books?” he sneers. “All those first editions you’re so proud of?”

I fix my eyes on the bookshelf across the room. He’s got his wing-tip shoe on my Achilles’ heel and he knows it.

My father is ridiculously wealthy, and the allowance he sends me each month is ridiculously generous. I don’t spend a penny of it on myself. Except for the books. After what happened over there, it’s easy to tell myself that I’ve earned the right to sit and brood with overpriced books.

But the thought of losing my book collection isn’t what has my heart pounding in my chest. I don’t need the books. But I do need my dad’s money, at least until I come into the trust fund from my mom’s side when I turn twenty-five.

The thought of continuing to take his monthly allowance, knowing that he thinks it all goes toward books and video games, makes me nauseous. I’d like nothing more than to tell him where he can shove those checks.

But the money’s not for me.

So I’ll continue to take it. Even if that makes me nothing more than a mooching cripple in his eyes.

“What do you want?” I ask gruffly, refusing to meet his eyes. It feels cowardly, but hey, I’ve gotten pretty good at cowardly.

He blows out a long breath. “I want you to try, Paul. I want you to at least try to come back to the living.”

“I mean with the next nurse you’re sending up here,” I say, cutting him off. “What do I have to do so you don’t throw your pathetic son out on the street to become yet another begging veteran?”

The word veteran hangs between us, and for a second I think he might relent, because if my Achilles’ heel is my dependency on him, his Achilles’ heel is my sacrifice for this country.

But the man’s stubbornness has only increased with age, and instead of backing off, he turns toward the desk, dropping the whisky glass with enough force so that the liquid sloshes over the sides and onto the wood. It’s an uncharacteristically careless gesture.