Jason said, “Do you know I have a pair of twin nephews nearly three years old now, and I’ve never seen them?”

“Yes,” Jessie said. “They look like their father, which means they look like you too.”

Jason nodded. “My brother wrote that meant yet another generation looked like my aunt Melissande.” James had written so amusingly about how it drove their father mad, that Jason easily pictured his twin’s smile and his father’s face as well. So many letters over the years, and he’d only begun really answering three years before. For the first two years he’d been here, he’d written acknowledgments, nothing important, nothing that really meant anything, if indeed anything did mean anything back then. But things had slowly begun to change. He’d begun to see behind the words in the letters that arrived weekly from his family, begun to feel again what they meant to him, and his letters had grown longer and, perhaps, richer, because he himself was now in them.

“Yes,” Jessie said. “We know. I feel we know all of your family very well indeed. It will be like seeing dear friends.”

Jason hadn’t realized that he’d spoken about his family all that much.

Alice said, “But none of your family have ever come here, Uncle Jathon. Why haven’t they come? Don’t they like you? Did they thend you away?”

“No, Alice, they all wanted to come to visit me. The truth is, I asked them not to come. And no, no one sent me away.” He paused a moment. “The truth is, I sent myself away.”

“But why?” Jonathan asked, sitting forward, hands on the table since he had no more bacon to slip to Old Corker.

Jason said slowly, “Some very bad things happened five years ago, Jon, and I was responsible for them. Only me.”

“You killed a man in a duel, Uncle Jason?” Ben asked, eyes shining, nearly ready to leap out of his chair.