Maybe it had been a mistake to insist he come to the meeting at all, Claire thought. He had changed, in the last few years. In the beginning, her father had considered the Colony an extension of himself, and, if anything, he’d been a micromanager, too fervently responsible for its development and maintenance. And then Mother had left him, refusing to make the move to the Colony. He’d considered it a personal betrayal. Claire had been almost relieved by the divorce, really—she’d never felt close to her mother. The woman was cold, self-involved ... As if to compensate for his wife’s betrayal of his dream—she had called the Colony "a vanity unprecedented in the history of mankind" and "a monument to the misbegotten"—Rimpler was more control-compulsive than ever.