“You remember I said all that?” Jessie said, a dark red eyebrow cocked up.

“Certainly. I remember every word you’ve ever uttered, my sweet.”

Jessie made a gagging sound that reduced her four children to giggles.

James felt both immense sadness and joy in that moment. Evidently Jason had finally come to grips with the past.

“Uncle Jason is prettier than Aunt Glenda,” Constance said and grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “When she’s not staring at him, she’s looking in the mirror, trying to figure out how to make herself look more like him. I told her once to give up. She threw her hairbrush at me.”

James cleared his throat. “You’ll make your uncle Jason blush, Connie, so let’s move along. Marcus and the duchess were here last year, and North and Caroline Nightingale the year before. Yes, it’s our turn to go to England and visit with everyone, your family included, Jase. I want to see if my wife swoons when she meets your twin, and you’ve told the children so many stories about Hollis, I know they’re expecting him to deliver stone tablets to them. Ah, and your father and mother, of course.”

“But they talk funny there,” said Benjamin. “Like Uncle Jason. I don’t want to go to this place.”

“Think of it as an adventure,” said his mother.

“Yes, that’s it exactly, Ben,” said Jason. He was thinking it would be an adventure for him as well as he sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his lean belly. “All my family will welcome you as you welcomed me.” He paused, looked at James and Jessie, shrugged. “I want to go home. I’ll be thirty years old next January.”

“That’s still only twenty-nine so you’re not that old, Uncle Jason,” Benjamin said. “When you’re as old as Papa, then you can go back there.”

“Your father is only thirty-nine, not all that great an age,” Jessie said, then paused and blinked. “I’m nearly thirty-one, more than a year older than you, Jason. Good heavens, how the time leaps away from one.”