“I was afraid it’d be one of my uncles what found me,” she said. “My cousins ain’t exactly doves, but my uncles are—” He felt her take a shaking breath. “Uncle Silas is a scorcher of the worst sort. People whisper when they talk about the Kincaids, but they scatter when they see him. He kills people, and they know it. Everyone knows it.” Her voice had dropped to a strained whisper. “My uncle Arlo ain’t much better.”

“Do you think they’ll give up on recruiting you back to the family business?”

He felt a shudder flow through her. “Never. No one questions Silas. No one thwarts him. My father could manage it now and then, but only by warning him that walloping and killing too many people would draw notice. It weren’t my father’s authority that won; it was my uncle not looking to get caught.”

“I wish you had even just one person in your family you could think about with fondness.”

“I know you think of your mother fondly,” she said. “You don’t talk about her much, but when you do, there is love in your voice.” She looked up at him and smiled sadly. “I can tell you miss her.”

“I do, and not just because she’s the only family I have,” he said. That spun his mind toward something else. “At least, I think she’s the only family I have.”

She turned her head to look directly at him, confusion in her eyes.

“There’s a man that’s come by the house a couple of times, and I saw him on the street at one point. He watched me very closely, enough that it caught my attention.”

She held more tightly to him. “Are you in danger, Baz?”

He didn’t know why it touched him so much that she worried for him. Perhaps because so few people had during his life. “I was wary of Mr. Snelling at first, but he came again today and explained his interest in me.”

“What did he say?”

“That I look a great deal like his sister, and he wonders if maybe we’re related.”

“If you are, that’d mean you have family.” She sounded as happy for him as he knew he would be if it proved true.

He nodded. “He lost touch with his sister twenty-five years ago. He’s not heard from her since. I find myself wondering if his sister and my mother might be one and the same.”

Gemma studied his face. Eager hopefulness sat in her eyes, something he didn’t see often. She was so adept at hiding her thoughts that it was often difficult to know what she was feeling.

“That would make him your uncle,” she said. “He would know where your mother came from and who her family were.”