Hearing someone else explain his plan made it sound so much more foolish. “Yes,” Thomas admitted.

“I’m all for playing the odds, Tommy, but the odds on this bet are pretty long.”

Thomas’s head dipped forward. “It’s stupid, I know. I didn’t realize how many miles of trenches there were.”

George stared at Thomas as though he were a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “Then why do it?”

Thomas looked up at George. Tears welled in his pale blue eyes. “It’s what brothers do.”

FIFTEEN

PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED AND emotionally drained, Thomas could feel his body begging for sleep, but his mind refused to rest. Hours after George, Charlie, and he had snuck back into the crew’s dugout, Thomas lay awake on his bunk, listening to the discordant rumblings of his crew’s sleep and replaying the numerous mistakes he’d made since the day James had told him of his plans to join the army. With every secret he’d kept, every lie that he’d told, he’d dug himself deeper, yet as he stared up at the bottom of George’s bunk, it wasn’t the many lies he’d told that he feared would bury him, but the one truth he’d shared.

Sleep was a skittish visitor, sneaking in for short stays, only to scurry away when frightful memories of no-man’s-land and anxious imaginings of when and how George would tell Bagger about Thomas breaking his rules returned. Thomas tried to convince himself that George wasn’t selfish enough to want Thomas transferred just to win some bets using Bagger’s ratter, but by the time the rest of the crew woke, George sat at the table feeding Max pieces of dried meat and smiling at Thomas.

When George asked Bagger if he could have a word with him, anxiousness roiled through Thomas’s stomach in nauseating waves, and when they exited the dugout to talk in private, Thomas began to pack his bag. They returned minutes later, and Thomas stood, prepared to face the consequences of his mistakes.

“I hear you’ve been keeping a secret, Dover,” Bagger said.

Thomas swallowed hard and shifted in his stance.

“Might as well fess up, lad. Shillings already let the cat out of the bag.”

Thomas glanced at George, who had the nerve to smile. He’d expected George to snitch on him, but was surprised, and a little hurt, that George found such amusement in the betrayal. He looked to Charlie, seated on his bunk next to Feathers’s cage. Charlie had a brother—he had to understand. Charlie kept his eyes locked on his sketch pad.

Bagger reached down, and Max jumped into his arms. “Or should I say he let the dog out of the bag?”

Unable to meet the old clay kicker’s disappointed gaze, Thomas stared at his boots and silently scolded himself for letting down his guard around George. He never should have trusted the London street urchin, but the damage was done. All that was left was to face his punishment.

He tightened his grip on his bag. “Are you sending me to France to dig trenches?”