She drew a breath, finally. “All right. Fine.” Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m too old, I guess, for a certain kind of fight. I’m not very good with changes, though. Too old for that, too.”

“None of us are good with changes,” Kimberly said, quietly.

Meghan looked at her. “You’ve grown into the white hair, at least.”

Ned drew a breath. He saw Aunt Kim close her eyes. When she opened them, they were suspiciously bright. One sister might be the crying type.

“I like that red on you,” she said.

His mother made a face. “Once a month. Jean-Luc on Green Avenue. I’d be sad and grey without him.”

She looked around at the others. Something had changed. The rigidity was gone. “Let’s get Greg cleaned up,” she said, “then you’ll tell me what’s going on. I need to know about Melanie.”

“All right,” said Kim, “but there’s a lot to tell. We’ll need wine.”

“I can do that,” Ned’s father said, almost too brightly.

Glancing across the grass, Ned saw Kate Wenger looking awkward and apprehensive, as if she felt she didn’t belong here. He wanted to go reassure her, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Something else, first.

“Can someone please ask Verawhatever to boil water?” Meghan Marriner said.

“I got that,” Ned said.

He took the terrace steps two at a time. Inside, he gave Veracook the request and told her there’d be two more for dinner. Then he went looking for his uncle.

He found him in the main-floor ensuite, off the bedroom Kim and Kate had shared. Melanie’s room.

He was shaving. That was why he hadn’t come out.

Grey and brown hairs were in the sink and on the tiled floor. Martyniuk had laid down his scissors and was lathered up, using a razor on the stubble that remained. He was working too fast and had cut himself a couple of times.

“You really think that’ll do it?” Ned asked from the bathroom doorway.

His uncle glanced at him from behind shaving cream. “We are all doomed if it doesn’t, right?”

“Not me,” said Ned. “You are. I had zip to do with this one.”

“Abandon me to my fate?”

“With my mother? Damn right.”

“What happened out there?” Dave Martyniuk was swooping the razor across his cheeks and neck.

Ned hesitated. “So far, okay. Better than I thought.”

“No explosion is better than I thought. How do I look?”

“Almost as bloody as Greg,” Ned said.

His uncle scowled at his reflection. “I’ll deal with that. But do I look different enough?”

Ned nodded. “I think so.”

“Give me five more minutes.”

“They’re boiling water to clean Greg’s wound. Slow down, you’ll attract sharks.”

His uncle grinned. “I like it. I have a witty nephew.” He suspended the blade a moment. “Only one I’ve got.”

Ned looked at him. “Don’t you…I thought you had a brother and…”

“Two nieces there. Older than you.”

Ned swallowed. “And you and Aunt Kim never…”

Dave Martyniuk shook his head briskly. “No, we never did. Is it too late for me to teach you a post-up move to the hoop?”

Ned tried to smile. He was old enough to know there was more to this. “I’m not tall enough. Perimeter game, defence, that’s my thing.”

His uncle shook his head again. “Uh-uh. The good guards have to know how to post-up when they get a mismatch. We’ll find a basketball net later.”

“I know where there are courts here.”

Martyniuk was shaving too rapidly again. “Good,” he said. Then swore, as the blade nicked his throat. “Go on back, I’ll be there in a few, unrecognizable.”

“OH MY GOD!” Meghan Marriner said.

She had looked up from where she was treating Greg at the dining-room table. “Ivorson? What are you doing here? I don’t—”

She stopped, very abruptly. Ned could see her figuring it out. Already. You could almost chase succeeding thoughts as they crossed her face.

Dave Martyniuk, a dab of Kleenex on each of two cuts that hadn’t stopped bleeding, paused in the doorway to the dining area. Aunt Kim hurried over to him. They hugged each other, hard, then she stepped back.

Ned’s father’s introduction died on his lips.

Greg was in a chair at the table. Meghan had been wrapping a bandage. Pots of boiled water stood on trivets beside clean cloths and white spools of gauze and tubes of antibiotics.

Turning from beside her husband, Kimberly straightened her shoulders and looked at her sister, as if ready for a blow. Ned, with Kate by the glass doors to the terrace, felt a massive surge of anxiety. They were a long way from being out of the woods on this. He looked at his uncle.

Unrecognizable.

Yeah. Sure. You’re, like, six-foot-three, with big shoulders and hands, and blue eyes, and you shave your beard and no one will know you from Danny DeVito?

And Ned’s mother was very, very quick. That’s why they’d wanted her here in the first place. One reason, anyhow. The other reason had to do with machetes and guns and bombs, and they weren’t going to talk about that. Although it was also why his uncle had taken that fake name—Ivanson, or whatever it was—and had been following her for years to places halfway around the world.

Ned waited for the explosion. It didn’t come.

Instead, Meghan Marriner, who never did, began to cry.

“Oh, Meg,” her sister whispered. “Oh, honey…”

Meghan held up a quick hand to stop her. Ned saw Kate Wenger biting her lip beside him, a gesture he knew pretty well by now.

His mother wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. She drew a breath and looked up. She stared at Martyniuk for a long moment.

“Three times?” she said finally.

He nodded.

“Sierra Leone, the Gulf. Darfur? That’s where I saw you?”

He cleared his throat. “Ah, four times, actually, being truthful. I was in Bosnia, but just for a few days…it didn’t end up looking too bad. You may not have spotted me.”

She was still staring, still thinking. “You found out when I signed up for missions and you went there, if you thought they were dangerous?”

He nodded again.

“Dropped everything in your life? Took a false name, false ID? In war zones?”

“That’s about it,” Martyniuk said. “It didn’t happen often, really.”

“Four times, you just said.”

Martyniuk nodded again. He made a face. “Damn. Looks like I just got rid of a beard I liked.”

There was a short silence. “You look better without it,” Meghan Marriner said.

“I tell him that too,” her sister murmured. “Meg, I—”

Again, Ned’s mother held up a hand. “I’m going to cry again if you talk, so don’t, Kim.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes from the big, capable figure of Dave Martyniuk in the doorway. “I need to be really clear on this. You left your work in England, your wife, you put yourself in danger around the world, you certainly broke laws, with computers and a fake identity, and why?”

He leaned on the doorframe, took his time. An unhurried man, Ned thought. “We felt a sense of responsibility.”

Meghan closed her eyes for a second. “You thought I did these things because…?”

Martyniuk’s expression was grave. “Meghan, sister-in-law, I learned a long time ago, the hard way, that people do things for an amazing variety of reasons, some good, some bad. Even heroic things. Sometimes we don’t know all the reasons for what we’re doing.”

“I’d say we usually don’t,” Edward Marriner said.

His wife looked at him.

“You knew about this, Ed? Do I have to kill you, too?”

He shook his head, but the threat, the joke of it, had already changed the mood. Ned could feel himself beginning to breathe properly again. “I heard about it two nights ago, honey.”

From the doorway, Martyniuk murmured, “If you want me dead, just tell me to shave closer. I seem to have lost the knack.”

“You were rushing,” Ned said.

The adults turned to him, all of them.

“Right, Nephew,” his uncle said. “The unchallenged expert of the family. You shave—what? — twice a week to show off?” He was grinning, though.