The novel frequently measures Joe’s character by what he is willing to forfeit, and as the structure of the novel forces him to run a gauntlet of increasingly complex moral dilemmas, each ethical choice that he makes carries a specific, calculable price tag. His first challenge is limited to the professional sphere of his life, for when Penny tells him about Senator Dobbins’s abuse of his wife and insists on keeping her own involvement in the affair a secret, Joe promises, “I won’t run any story unless I can do it without using your name” (124). This promise binds him to a specific course of action long before he understands what his decision will cost him personally. Yet even when he understands that he may lose his career over this issue, Joe’s position has not changed, and he declares to the AP lawyer, Joette Brecke, “I won’t give up my source” (125). Determined to honor Penny’s wishes, Joe takes on a considerable amount of risk in his own life.

Midway through Joe’s adventures in Buckley, however, he experiences a peculiar collision between his own unresolved issues over his past with Kathy and the town’s superficial misjudgment of him as nothing more than “Little Toke.” Chagrined to be saddled with the nickname of the man who abandoned him before he was born and whose given name he has been burdened to carry all his life, Joe struggles to make his new acquaintances in Buckley realize that on the ethical front, he bears no resemblance to the man who is technically his father. The most tangible “inheritance” that he ever receives from his father—other than the battered GTO—is the instinctive distrust and hatred of those who knew Toke well. In this context, his determination to hold true to his own moral stance slips somewhat in the heat of the moment, as his lapse with Vicky suggests. Caught up in the alternate reality of small-town Buckley and its many sticky entanglements, he allows himself to forget—however briefly—his own identity and obligations. In allowing Vicky to kiss him, he dabbles in the fantasy that he is a different person entirely.

Although Joe’s judgment in personal matters is sometimes heavily flawed, this strong ethical pattern nonetheless holds true across every theater of his life. The principle that costs him his job is the same principle that eventually costs him his inheritance. In Chapter 50, when Joe stands in Bob Mullen’s office, holding Jeannie’s misspelled suicide note, he realizes that Toke is the true culprit in both Jeannie’s death and Angel’s overdose, and he understands that the slayer statute will prevent Toke—and by extension himself—from inheriting the Hix estate. Sitting alone on a park bench, he considers Mullen’s cynical prediction: “You’ll start thinking that six million sounds a whole lot better than three million. I’ve seen it happen” (288). In Joe’s version of this temptation, he rationalizes his desire to remain silent and take Angel’s money by enumerating all the good he could do for Jeremy, thinking, “I could set up a trust fund. He would never have to work” (322). Rather than presenting Joe as an impossibly incorruptible soul, Eskens creates a scene that forces the protagonist to give the temptation its full weight before deciding to do the right thing.

When Joe walks the suicide note to Sheriff Kimball and forfeits the Hix estate, he holds true to the deepest essence of himself, preserving his integrity and renouncing Toke’s legacy of deceit and harm in the process. Haunted by Lila’s words—“All you had to do was be a decent guy, and you couldn’t do that” (259)—Joe willingly pays the price of embracing said decency and regains his own equilibrium. Inspired by Bob Mullen’s contention that home is often “a person,” Joe gives up the wayward dream of what might be and resolutely strives to recover the life that he has built for himself by begging Lila’s forgiveness. By this point in the novel, Joe has finally paid enough for his principles to recognize the true value of what he already has.