Sam was thirteen when he finally asked the question that had apparently been building quietly in him for years, waiting for whatever combination of maturity and courage it required to finally voice aloud.

It came on an ordinary evening, the three of them gathered in the study after dinner, Sam working through homework while Lucien and Ezra added their own careful entries to the current volume of the notebook, a ritual that had, over six years, become as natural to their household as breathing itself.

Sam had grown considerably over the past several years, no longer the small, guarded seven-year-old with a battered paperback held protectively in his lap, but...