The men grew silent as Adam’s words took them back to the day when three eight-year-old boys were forced to make peace with each other. They’d been fighting all morning until their foster mother, Sally Duke, had had enough. She put sandwiches, chips and boxes of juice up in the custom tree house she’d had built for them and warned them not to come down until they could learn to live as brothers.

They were up in that tree house for hours before the dark and dirty secrets began to spill out. Cameron confessed about life on the edge with his junkie mom. Brandon talked without emotion about his father, who beat him regularly until the man was killed in a bar fight. His mother had disappeared long before that, so Brandon was put into the foster care system.

Adam had never known his parents. He’d been abandoned outside a hospital at age two, then raised in an orphanage and a series of foster homes, one worse than the next. He’d been thrown out of four homes and was on a collision course with juvenile hall when Sally Duke found him and took him home.

All three boys were considered bad risks, but that hadn’t deterred Sally, a young, wealthy woman who had recently lost her husband and had plenty of love to share. Sally’s beloved husband had been a foster kid, too, and she wanted to give back to the system that had produced such a fine, self-made man as her husband, William.

Up in that tree house, having divulged their secrets, the three boys swore allegiance to each other. From that moment, they were blood brothers and nothing would split them apart. As part of their pact, they swore they would never get married or have kids because, based on their experience, married people hurt each other and parents hurt their kids. Even if Sally kicked them all out of her big house on the bluff overlooking Dunsmuir Bay, they swore they’d remain brothers forever.

But Sally was determined to make sure the boys knew that her home was their home, that they were a real family now. She was strict when she needed to be, but always warm and loving, and all three boys had thrived in her care. Eventually, she was able to adopt them and give them her last name. The Duke brothers grew up as a force to be reckoned with.