“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since the day I accepted. Assign me somewhere else. The Treasury or the State Department.”

“To investigate tax fraud?” Wilkie’s voice dripped with disbelief.

“Tax forms don’t die in front of you because you fell asleep on the job.” It was his deepest shame, for he’d literally fallen asleep while he was supposed to be watching Molly.

Wilkie dropped the cigar and leaned across his desk. “You’ve got to get over what happened to your sister. It was twenty years ago.”

“You never get over the death of someone you were supposed to protect.”

And he had been Molly’s only protector. After their father died, it was just him and Molly, for their mother had run off with a traveling salesman years earlier. He was fourteen and Molly only six when their father died. He didn’t like leaving a child as young as Molly on her own, but he had to earn a living and couldn’t afford to hire someone to look after her. He dropped out of school to work the overnight shift at the Chicago Tribune. Feeding huge spools of paper into noisy printing machinery wasn’t the ambition of any young man, but it paid the bills. Over time, his eye for detail got him promoted to the photoengraving department, where he learned the techniques that made the reproduction of photographs commercially viable for newspapers.

Every night he worried about Molly. When he returned home each morning, he breathed a sigh of relief as he jostled her awake, got her dressed, and walked her to school. Then he collapsed into bed and slept into the afternoon.

But he’d yearned for more. As the years passed, he grew accustomed to his overnight shift, but he wanted more out of life than black-and-white newsprint. He wanted color and art and beauty. By the time he was eighteen, he’d saved enough money to take art classes while Molly was in school, but it played havoc with his ability to sleep. He grabbed a few hours here and there, but it seemed he never had enough.

And in the end, Molly paid the price.

“Find someone else for the job,” Nathaniel stressed. “I’ll never be a bodyguard.”

“You’re not a bodyguard, you’re a detective. You’ve already spotted a potential security flaw with the first lady’s secretary, but we’ll need to keep the investigation quiet. The Delacroixs are a powerful family.”

“What can you tell me about them?” Nathaniel had limited experience with high society, but Wilkie mingled with ease.