The sentence hung in the air for a moment before Luke looked away and flopped back onto the cot, the fight draining out of him as he stared at the ceiling. It looked like he was struggling to find the right words, and Gray waited, counting the beats of his heart and praying against all evidence that Luke had some logical explanation for all this. He would do anything humanly possible to get his brother out of this cesspit, but he couldn’t do it without Luke’s cooperation.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Luke finally said. “Every day I’m stuck in here to swelter and count my regrets, and they are endless. I’ve squandered so much in life. I’ve gone down dead ends and broken the rules just for the challenge of it, but every now and then I stumble into doing something right, and I’ve got to protect that. I don’t have much in my life to be proud of, but . . .”

It looked like he wanted to say more, but he abruptly closed his mouth, crossed his arms, and kept staring at the ceiling. Could Luke be somehow proud of this imprisonment? That was what it had sounded like he was about to say.

“Tell me how I can help, and I’ll do it,” Gray said earnestly.

Luke pushed himself upright and shook off his momentary gloom. “Get Caroline to stand down and quit worrying about me. Tell her I’m going to be fine.”

With a bruised face, sunken chest, and pasty skin, Luke didn’t look fine.

“Can I tell her you were awarded a degree from the Naval Academy?”

A devilish smile briefly appeared on Luke’s face. “I’d prefer that you didn’t.”

It was as close to an answer as Gray was going to get. If anything, Luke had delivered a rather forceful denial, but Gray could usually tell when Luke was lying. Even as a child, if Luke got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he’d scratch behind his ear while forcefully denying it. And Luke had scratched behind his ear a lot this afternoon.

As he boarded the ship home, Gray knew in the marrow of his bones that Luke was hiding a much larger story.

Thirty-Eight

Good weather meant that Gray arrived back from Cuba a full day earlier than expected. A gust of chilly wind pushed a swirl of autumn leaves down the cobblestone street. Normally he loved October. He was rarely in Alexandria as the leaves curled and dropped, releasing that peaty scent and a glorious riot of color before the town braced for winter.

As he dismounted at the public stable, he was surprised to see Caroline’s horse in one of the stalls. It was Sunday, the only day she could escape the White House, but she usually spent it in the city with her friends.

“My sister is here?” he asked the stable owner.