“Like hell. A hundred, maybe two hundred people showed up. Mothers bringing the children she’d treated, people she’d treated as kids bringing their own children. All those strangers made it to her funeral, but not her own brother. She touched a lot of lives in her life, Jack, but yours most of all. She practically raised you. You brought out the nurturer in her. When you needed changing or needed to be sung to sleep, she’d take over, she’d say she’d do it. She’d all but fight with your mother to take care of you.”

“I know,” Jack whispered through a constricting throat. “Don’t you think I’d have been there if it had been possible—any way possible?”

“Then why weren’t you?”

How could he tell him it was because BATF and FBI people were there too? Taking pictures. Because of the way Kate died, and the events leading up to and connected to her death, they’d camped outside the funeral home and cemetery with their telefoto lenses. Jack had spotted them just as he was about to turn into the funeral home parking lot. He’d driven on. He couldn’t let them take his picture and have it end up pinned to a corkboard wall with a question mark beneath it. Who he was was a question he didn’t want them even asking, let alone answering.

“It wasn’t…it just wasn’t possible.”

“Why not? Were you in jail? In a hospital in a coma? Those reasons I’ll accept. Anything less…”

“I was there. I couldn’t make it to the ceremonies, but I visited her grave after the funeral.”

“If you could show up then, why couldn’t you show up before?”

Jack remembered the anger he’d felt at spotting the feds outside the funeral home. But it had been an anger tinged with guilty relief. Their presence meant he wouldn’t have to face Kate’s kids, her ex-husband, and his father. Because there’d be too many questions about Kate’s last days and he couldn’t tell them anything because there was so much she hadn’t wanted them to know. But most of all because he felt in some ways responsible for her death. In her last moments he’d soothed her while she bled, held her cooling hand after she died.

“Through the whole ordeal,” his father said, “everyone kept asking if the long-lost Jack would show, and I said of course you would, especially since she’d just been taking care of you while you were sick.”

“You know about that?”