Then he threw open the front door, where he found Amalie standing on the front porch. Her eyes widened, as though she had expected someone other than Collier to be standing there.

“Bonjour, ca va?” Collier said, smiling. “My goodness, what seems to be the problem?”

Evan had rolled his motorized wheelchair as close to the railing as possible. He was feeling very sore, now that he had been off the painkillers for a while. The pain was sharp and crisp, like the air. But in an odd way it didn’t feel all that objectionable.

“What the hell is going on, Dad?” he asked. “Who’s that?”

Down below them John Collier was leading a thin, pretty black woman toward the stables.

Evan’s father looked intently into Evan’s face. “You look different today,” he said. “How come?”

Evan didn’t tell his father he had stopped taking his pills. He needed to focus, to se clñ€†e things without the haze of the drugs. If his father was involved in something, Evan didn’t want to raise his suspicions.

“Seriously,” he said. “Who is that woman? What are you and John doing in the woods?”

“John’s an extraordinary young man,” Wilmot said. “Brilliant, actually. He’s been developing a new method of alternative energy production—ethanol from wood pulp. You know how much wood pulp waste we produce here. I thought I’d bring him out here, fund his little project, see where it went.”

“So he’s running some kind of factory out there in the woods?”

Wilmot nodded. “Labor’s a little tight around here right now. A bunch of Congolese women showed up in Coeur d’Alene last year, escaping from the genocide in eastern Congo. I hired them to help John out.”

“I was wondering,” Evan said. “When I found John here . . . well, I found it odd that you hired him to take care of me.”

“He’s your friend, isn’t he?” Wilmot said sharply. “You’ve known him since he was this high.” Evan’s father held his hand two feet off the ground.

Evan didn’t say anything. John was pleasant enough to Evan, and was always scrupulous in his duties. But Evan understood people. He was pretty sure John Collier resented him as much as ever.

Wilmot put his arm around Evan. It felt nice. He knew his father loved him . . . but he wasn’t an effusive or emotional guy. “You’re going to get cold out here, son.”

“I’m fine. Feels good, actually.”

His father squeezed his shoulder. He seemed uncharacteristically meditative. Ordinarily he was in constant motion, always doing something, directing somebody, driving forward, pressing on.

“Let’s get you back inside before you catch a cold,” he said, stepping behind the wheelchair and pushing it back inside without waiting for Evan’s consent.

For months there had been whispered conversations between Collier and his father, sudden changes in their demeanor when he rolled into a room. Somewhere in the back of his doped-up brain, he’d been dimly aware of their strange behavior, but now that he was feeling clearheaded, he felt like he was being whacked in the face with it. Now, as his father pushed him back into the warmth of the house, Evan felt more sure than ever that something was wrong. Why would his father hire a bunch of African women who didn’t speak English to work at an experimental ethanol plant in the middle of the Idaho woods when there were plenty of local out-of-work loggers who would gladly do hard work for shit pay?

Although it had wrecked his body, Evan remained proud of his service to his country. But Evan’s sacrifice had changed his father, turned him from an outspoken isolationist into someone whose quiet anger ran deeper than Evan could fathom. Now, Evan was determined to find out what he and Collier were up to.

Keeping his sudden resolve to himself, Evan pushed the joystick, steering the wheelchair away from his father. “See you later, Dad.”

“Where is Christiane?” Amalie demandeh tñ€†d. “You say everything is fine but you won’t show me Christiane!”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll take you to her. Will you calm down if I promise to take you to her?” He shepherded Amalie down the semicircular driveway in front of the massive Wilmot house. He had been planning to deal with her in the barn. But he could see that wasn’t going to work. She was still too agitated.

“Let’s get in the car,” he said, placing a hand on her arm.

She yanked her arm free of his hand and glared at him.

“Do you want me to take you, or not?”

After a moment, she nodded tensely and walked to Collier’s F-150.

Collier sighed loudly and looked back over his shoulder. He wanted to make sure that he didn’t do anything Mr. Wilmot would disapprove of.

Evan and Wilmot were still up on the balcony, looking down at him.

The sight of Wilmot with his arm around Evan’s shoulder was like a knife twisting in his gut. Collier was not the sort of person to spend a lot of time reflecting on the past. But he couldn’t help thinking about the time he’d left this place.

It had been an ugly thing. And only Wilmot knew the whole story.

John Collier had been born right here on the property. His mother had been Evan’s babysitter and housekeeper.

It was never clear who Collier’s father was. His mother wouldn’t say. And she’d died before he wormed the truth out of her. As a kid, Collier had occasionally fantasized that Wilmot himself was his father. But the older he got, the less plausible that seemed. Where Dale Wilmot was big and strong and rawboned and square jawed, Collier was small and delicate and thin, with fine, almost elfin features, and red hair. Since Collier’s mother was none of these things, it could only be that he’d gotten these qualities from his father.

Still, growing up fatherless on the estate, he couldn’t help but look toward Wilmot as a father figure. There had been no other candidate—unless you included Arne Szellenborg, the Wilmot family butler/gardener/whatever, who was queer as a three-dollar bill and had a barely hidden drinking problem.

Wilmot had intermittently recognized Collier’s talents—rewarding him with a watch or a BB gun when he won the spelling bee or the science fair. But Wilmot’s attention to Collier had always been offhanded, a bone thrown to the help.

And so John Collier had grown up in the shadow of Evan.

Evan, the golden boy. Evan, the perfect son. Evan, in whom Dale Wilmot had clearly placed all his hope for the future.

And Evan, the son of a bitch, was worthy of those hopes. Where Wilmot was handsome in a slightly brutal way, Evan was downright beautiful, his features chiseled and fine boned. Where Wilmot had earned a football scholarship at U of I based on his relentlessness and competitive spirit (and possibly on his cruelty), Evan had won trophy after trophy on pure grace, on an ability to run distances without tiring, on a gift for sensing holes in the defensive line and snaking through for impossible eight- and ten- and fifteen-yard gains. Where Wilmot saw men as Andñ€†tools he could pluck from a box and manipulate, Evan had a genuine interest in people. He was a leader because people wanted him to like them, not because he calculated the advantage he might gain from them. It was only in school that Collier could offer Evan any competition at all. In every class, Evan Wilmot was first and John Collier was second. Except science and math, where it was the other way around.

Three weeks before Evan’s eighteenth birthday, he had won the state dressage championships down in Nampa in his age range. And so, for his birthday, Wilmot had given his son a $75,000 horse.

Collier’s birthday, as it happened, fell only two days later. Wilmot got him a $500 gift certificate to Radio Shack.

The disparity had chafed at Collier. Every day he’d gotten out of bed, looked out the window of the little house where he and his mom lived. He’d hear the sound of his mother hacking and coughing as she cleared her lungs with a first cigarette, and look out the window at the ring where Evan was already busy working with his horse. Rising up behind the paddock was the Wilmot house. Like everything that touched Wilmot, it was a reflection of the man himself. At first glance the house looked like any other large pseudo-rustic post-and-beam house that you might find throughout the western mountains of the United States. It was only after a certain amount of comparison between the building and its foreground that you realized just how massive it was. It had a sort of sham humility that was not supposed to fool you but to give off the message: “See, I’m just like you. Normal, no frills, salt-of-the-earth, jeans-and-work boots. Except vastly superior to you in every aspect.”