Zeitgeist
an excerpt

Warren could only hear his daughter’s words through her mother’s eyes. They contracted sternly, widened in indignation, drooped with empathetic sorrow, and glared through him without remorse. All he could hear was a low, steady stream of muffled blubbering from the earpiece. But it was enough to know that, yet again, something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” he mouthed to Cynthia, leaning against the kitchen wall. She shushed him with a stern finger as her stack of golden bracelets slid down her slender arm to her elbow. He sighed, and snatched the marker from her that she had been twirling between her fingers. What’s going on? He scribbled on the kitchen whiteboard, then underlined it for emphasis.
Cynthia snatched the marker from him and replied by writing on top of his words: NOT NOW.
Warren huffed and shuffled past her, then slid into a seat at the kitchen table.
“He’s just a boy still, Alice. He’s just not ready. He may never be, and you’re going to have to be prepared for that.” Boy troubles again, then. If anyone had asked Warren his opinion, he would have warned her against dating co-workers, no matter how charming or exotic they seemed. But no one ever asked him.
“Well, no, that isn’t his responsibility. I know—Alice, listen to your mother. I know you’ve changed, I know you’re better off now. But you’re still going to have to live with the consequence of your past. Everyone has to. Just look at—look at your father!”
Warren raised an eyebrow and straightened up in his seat.
“He has to live every day with the knowledge that his daughter can’t trust him, and he has to accept that it’s because of choices he made in the past,” Cynthia explained. “Now you can be like him, and not try to fix those mistakes—“
“I beg your pardon?” Warren snapped, only to get shushed again.
“—Or you can fix them. You’re doing the right thing, honey, I promise.” Cynthia turned the corner into the utility room, phone cord stretching behind her like tripwire. “Once your book is out, I think you’ll really feel healed, and I bet the death threats will even taper off.”
Death threats? Warren cupped his head in his hands.
“No, Van doesn’t have to protect you from those crazy cultists. But ask yourself this—if he doesn’t want to, is that really the sort of man you want to be with for the rest of your life?”