No matter how hard he worked, no matter what sort of discipline he exhibited, that thumb-size bend meant he would never be acceptable in the eyes of his family. The Cassaroy name carried with it certain obligations, expectations handed down from generation to generation, gathering moss and heft. His great-great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War. And the Cassaroy males made regular appearances in the historical record after that, inevitably linked to combat. Here a first lieutenant in the Spanish-American War, there an artilleryman in the trenches of Château-Thierry. The Cassaroys were represented in the lesser wars as well, wars no one had ever heard of, wars no one would ever remember were it not for the framed battlefield portraits that lined the dark hallways of his childhood manor. The Sheepeater Indian War, the Second Sumatran Expedition, the Red River War. If two forces spit at each other, there you’d find a Cassaroy, brandishing a rifle and a razor-straight spine, the first to show up, like an overeager party guest. His father had stormed Omaha, a muck-and blood-drenched affair he never hesitated to relive in the flickering light of the hearth, waving around a glass of century-old Grande Champagne cognac for punctuation.

Countless times René had heard that old chestnut about veterans never speaking of their wartime experiences. Would that it were true for the Cassaroys, who trotted out every scrape and scare like campfire tales made better by the retelling.

Were he not the sole Cassaroy heir and the biological end of the line, the pressure might have been less. And the disappointment. Born prematurely, René suffered from asthma and sundry illnesses in his childhood. He wasn’t classic Cassaroy stock, but he had a passable build and was willing to give it the college try. None of his ailments mattered until he tried to enlist. His scoliosis was so minor it was missed by his pediatrician, and yet the eagle-eyed army recruiter had picked it up in an instant. As had the navy man. The marines. Even the air force. Despite Papa Cassaroy’s considerable connections, René’s application to the CIA didn’t make it past the first round.

No one wanted him.

René was in his mid-twenties when Father threw a clot and cracked his head open on the claw-foot bathtub. Mother, a long-suffering waif out of a Tennessee Williams play, had succumbed to some vaguely defined ailment a few years prior. Father hadn’t seemed to mind—she’d given him only one son of inferior make—and René certainly felt no loss of love when she passed. Yet when Father had gone, he felt not just the lifting of an age-old weight from his shoulders but also an intense loneliness. All the old man’s badgering and bullying had at least been a form of attention, an acknowledgment that René Peter Cassaroy did in fact exist.