Jason Sherbrooke knew it was time to go home when he rolled away from Lucinda Frothingale, stared into the fat ugly face of her pug, Horace, who growled at him, and suddenly, with no warning at all, saw his twin, eyes sheened with tears as he’d waved good-bye to Jason from the dock at the Eastbourne Harbor. Waved until the ship was too far away for Jason to see him. Jason felt tears choking his throat and an ache so deep he knew his heart was cracking clean in two.

Jason eyed the dog curled up against his mistress’s side, then turned onto his belly, listening to both Lucinda’s and Horace’s breathing. It was true, only moments before he’d felt sated all the way to his heels, and then suddenly he’d been flooded with that particular memory, and the pain of it. Now, just moments later, he was impatient, so restless he could barely keep still. He wanted, quite simply, to jump out of Lucinda’s warm bed and start swimming across the Atlantic.

After nearly five years, Jason Sherbrooke wanted to go home.

At eight o’clock that morning, Jason was seated at the big breakfast table in the Wyndham dining room. He looked at the two people who’d welcomed him into their home so many years before, and at their two boys and two girls who had all become very dear to him. He cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. He prayed that lovely, fluent thoughts would flow flawlessly out of his mouth, which, naturally, didn’t happen. He said only, a lump in his throat the size of the Crack County racetrack, “It’s time.”