Meeting Victor
Chapter 10 - Meeting Victor
Nathan requested a single, supervised meeting with Victor before the trial began, understanding he needed some version of direct confrontation regardless of whatever answers his brother actually offered.
Victor looked considerably smaller in the county jail's visitation room than he had at the construction site, the confident bulk that had once carried genuine authority now simply carrying the weight of a man cornered by his own choices.
"I don't expect you to explain this in a way that makes sense to me," Nathan said, sitting across from him. "I want to hear it anyway. Why me. Why this way."
Victor was quiet a long moment, something moving behind his eyes that looked, to Nathan's surprise, almost like genuine grief rather than simple calculation.
"I've known about you since I was twenty-two," Victor said finally. "Dad told me, near the end, when he was sick and finally decided the secrets weren't worth keeping any longer. He told me about the will's provision, about the firstborn clause, and he told me he intended to find you himself before he died."
"He never got the chance," Nathan said.
"He died four months later," Victor said. "Before he ever located you. I inherited everything, believing, for years, that the provision was simply theoretical, since nobody had ever formally established which of us was actually born first."
"Until you found me yourself," Nathan said.
"Until I found you myself," Victor confirmed. "I told myself, at first, I only wanted to see who you'd become. I convinced myself I was simply curious. It wasn't until I actually saw you, working an ordinary construction shift, entirely unaware of what you were actually owed, that something in me decided the safest path forward was making sure you never found out at all."
"Safest for you," Nathan said. "Not safest for me. You tried to kill me, Victor. Twice."
Victor's composure finally cracked completely, tears falling, though Nathan found himself entirely unmoved by them, exhausted past the point where his brother's grief could soften anything.
"I've spent my entire adult life believing I was the son our father chose," Victor said. "Finding out that wasn't true, that I was simply the one who happened to stay, terrified me more than I know how to fully explain. I told myself eliminating the threat was the only way to protect everything I'd built my entire identity around."
"You didn't protect anything," Nathan said. "You destroyed it yourself, the moment you decided murder was an acceptable price for keeping it."
May you like
Nathan stood, having heard everything he needed to hear, understanding that whatever brotherhood might have existed between them in some other version of their lives had never actually had a chance to form in this one.
"I hope you use whatever time you have left," he said, "to actually understand what you did, rather than simply regretting that it didn't work."
