“I waited my whole life for a brother,” she whispered against my shoulder.

“I am not about to let you go now.”

I put my arms around my sister and held her while the spring wind came off the lake and moved through the pines above our mother’s grave, carrying away, it felt, the last of the dust and the shadows.

For the first time in my life I was not Bennett Hale, the man other men feared.

I was not the master of an empire or the keeper of its secrets.