Page 523 of The Sinner: James

Weeks ago, I couldn’t imagine my mother these days, how she looked or what she was doing with her life, let alone that I’d have a brother who resembled me so much.

As I observe them, they also study me––a smile tugging at my mother’s lips and admiration gleaming in my brother’s eyes.

Looking at him, I try to remember what I thought about life when I was twenty or twenty-one, perhaps even younger.

I’m sure my father was a role model for me.

Whether he wanted it or not that’s another story.

He put me in charge of Red’s affairs early on, and that did it for me.

I had to become a real man fast, earn people’s respect, and make them fear me, if nothing else.

I learned to read them and make them do what I wanted from them.

I don’t remember being as angry as Tiago is, but you can’t rely on memory entirely when it comes to these things.

Sometimes, the brain blocks out certain memories, so it’s possible I can’t remember.

I’m sure I was angry and had the same obsessive love for money as he has, if not more.

In that regard, he and I aren’t that different. It just happens that I’ve had a better setup from the get-go.

Perhaps that was my father’s wisdom.

He had planted the seeds of hunger in me and set me free, letting me accomplish real things.

That’s how I learned to rein in my emotions, harness that energy, and turn it into something useful.

At that time, that something was money, of course.

Once I got a taste of the perks that came with it and felt the power it was giving me, my anger was gone.

I had no use for it.

That’s how I managed not to think about my mother, either, and to forget that, in a sense, I was alone.

That’s how a lot of things have fallen into place for me.

Furtively, I study him.

Behind the wall of coldness he’s built around his heart, I get a glimpse of me.

He’s hungry for life, as only a twenty-something-year-old would be.

In his smile and laughter, I see a man with a strong heart who can absorb wisdom while living intensely.

He runs deep the way I do, but unlike me, he doesn’t know how to harness that depth and make it useful.

How not to feel the pain of it.

He does the only thing he knows by keeping his heart locked away and crushing other people’s souls.

The way I used to do it.

That thought makes me smile.

Bitterly, though.

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