Less than an hour later, the entire O’Donnell family and Kateri were in the Twilight Hills Hotel van and speeding back up the highway to Northern Virginia.

Alex had taken the wheel. His father was in no state to drive. Kateri was riding shotgun, and Alex knew she was praying silently as she sat, fingering her scapular. Sam and David, more quiet than usual, sat in the back seat, not playing video games. Alex’s dad was sitting in front of the boys next to Mom, his head in his hands. Alex could hear his sobs as they drove.

Aunt Mona had called them, after she had looked up the hotel number on the Internet. She was in hysterics, and she had been ever since Uncle Cass had dropped dead in the hospital emergency room.

Aunt Mona had just thought her husband had the flu. He’d been complaining of a sore throat and headache for a few days. But then he started having trouble breathing, and Aunt Mona rushed him to the hospital. While they were filling out the paperwork, he went into shock, and fell backwards onto the emergency room floor, ballpoint pen still in hand. He was dead fifteen minutes later.

Alex wasn’t feeling anything now—just concentrating on driving the van and getting his parents there safely. But a steady tattoo of questions was running through his mind.

“It’s so bizarre,” Mom said, breaking into Alex’s thoughts. “To die of the flu—in this day and age.”

“It’s like God’s judgment,” Kateri said, and then quickly looked at Alex. “I’m sorry,” she said, a bit husky. “I didn’t know him. I guess from what you told me about him, I don’t like him very much. Maybe he was nicer in person?”

Alex found himself wanting to laugh. “No. He wasn’t.” He silenced himself.

“Guess he didn’t get his flu shot. Too weird. Too random.” David shook his head, in a fourteen-year-old’s attempt to come to grips with the tragedy.

Alex looked into the rear-view mirror and met his father’s red eyes. Instantly he knew that he and Dad were thinking the same thing. Uncle Cass had not died of the flu. And his death was not random.

When they arrived at Aunt Mona’s house, she met them at the door. Her red hair was disheveled and she was missing one oversized earring. “Oh Alan! Oh Kitty!” she exclaimed, and fell into his dad’s arms, sobbing while his mom patted her on the back. It was as though all the bad feelings between them had evaporated, and they were back to behaving like a normal family. Had his parents and Aunt Mona ever gotten along? Maybe a long time ago? Alex wasn’t sure. He stood a bit awkwardly to one side with Kateri and his brothers, while his mom and dad helped Aunt Mona to the massive oak kitchen, where his dad started making tea at Mom’s suggestion. After a moment or two of standing around while the grownups fell to talking and weeping, the younger generation drifted back into the living room.

“Keep quiet so they can have some space,” Alex said in a hushed voice to Sam and David, who obeyed with unusual attention.

In the living room, Sam sank onto the white leather couch, while David stood around fidgeting, hands in his pockets. Kateri sat down carefully on a white satin antique-looking chair.

“Nice house,” Kateri said, looking around, apparently wanting to say something.

“If you like this sort of thing,” Alex said, his eyes traveling over the opulent room with its glass coffee table showcasing marbleized Venetian glass paperweights that probably had never held down any paper. Vanity of vanities, he thought randomly, and made himself say another prayer for his uncle’s soul. It was odd to think that Uncle Cass, his enemy for so long, was dead. And no longer an enemy.

He noticed a picture hanging very low on the wall and recognized that it was probably covering the place where the drywall had been punched in during the fight. Although he was sorely tempted, he decided not to mention it to Kateri.

But now that he had started thinking about that night, Alex couldn’t stop.

In a moment, he had crossed to the door of the home office and tried it. It was open.

Glancing around, he made a decision and slipped inside.

The office was in more disarray than the last time Alex had seen it. Books and papers were scattered everywhere. He stepped cautiously, looking around carefully.

“Hey, what are you doing?” David said, pushing open the door. “You trying to get onto their computer or something?”

“Shh! No.”

Kateri was behind him. “Alex, why are you in here?”

“Just curious.”

“CKTC!” Sam piped up from behind her.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” Kateri warned, hands on her hips.

“I’m not touching anything! I’m just looking,” Alex rounded the corner of the desk. The laptop was open, but it was off. He looked carefully over the large mahogany surface.

At last he spotted what he was looking for. In the wastebasket was a torn envelope from the Sundance Fun Foundation. But it wasn’t a paper envelope. It was a red padded envelope that looked as though it had been heavily taped.

So Uncle Cass had gotten his check.

He reached down for the envelope and found his hand caught by Kateri’s.

“You just said you weren’t going to touch anything,” she reminded him.

Now he was annoyed. “I’m just looking in his trashcan!” he whispered.

“Doesn’t matter! It’s in his office!”

“Look, will you stop picking a fight?”

“I’m picking a fight? You’re the one who’s poking around in someone’s private papers!” she hissed. “Leave it alone, or I’ll call your aunt!”

“Fine,” he retreated from the trashcan. “If you want to be pigheaded about it.”

Just then, the doorbell rang loudly, right behind them.

All of them jumped. Hurriedly, they all exited the office. Feeling guilty despite himself, Alex attempted to open the front door calmly. “Can I help you?”

Two men in dark suits stood on the doorstep. One was short, with blond, bristling hair and a stiff, wooden expression, the other was tall, dark haired, and thoughtful-looking. Behind them, a police car was quietly pulling up to the curb.

The taller man produced an ID. “I’m Agent T. Furlow of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We need to speak to Mrs. Cassidy O’Donnell.”

Hearing the doorbell, Aunt Mona had come out from the kitchen, trailed by Alex’s parents. “I’m right here,” she managed to say. “What—?”

“Mrs. O’Donnell,” the agent said, looking sober. “Agent Furlow of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is my partner, Carter Randolph. May we speak to you?”

“Come in,” she said, backing up.

“Actually, I’ll need to ask you to step outside,” Agent Furlow said apologetically. There were police officers coming up the walk. Aunt Mona didn’t seem to like this idea, but the FBI was the FBI. She came out onto the walk, holding her arms around herself, trailed by Kateri and the O’Donnells.

The agent glanced around. “Are these people your relatives?”

“Yes.” Aunt Mona started to shake. “Oh God. What did Cass do? Is he in trouble?”

“Not any more,” Agent Furlow said. “But perhaps the rest of us are. The medical examination showed us the cause of your husband’s death.”

“It wasn’t the flu,” Alex guessed, speaking aloud before he could stop himself.

The agent gave him a keen look from his blue eyes. “No.” He turned back to Aunt Mona. “He died of ricin inhalation, a biohazard contaminant. I’m afraid we need to quarantine this house in order to search for the source of the contaminant.” He looked at the rest of them. “Also, for your own protection, everyone in the house needs to be given medical attention immediately. We have our biohazard unit coming to escort you all to a medical facility for decontamination and observation.”

He didn’t mention that it was going to be a top-secret medical facility, Kateri thought to herself hours later as she sat in her windowless room, staring at the cinderblock wall. After the agent’s pronouncement, what had followed was something out of a science-fiction movie. An eighteen-wheeled truck had backed into the cul-de-sac and a team of men in puffed-out yellow suits with masks descended on the house. The O’Donnells and Kateri weren’t allowed to return to the house, not even to get Mrs. O’Donnell’s purse. Instead, they had all been asked to get inside the truck, which turned out to have a complete decontamination facility inside of it.

After being shown to a private shower, Kateri was instructed to wash twice with a decontamination solution and rinse, scrubbing for at least five minutes for each session (she did ten). At some point during her third shower, she became aware that the truck was moving, and realized, with a tremor in her stomach, that she was completely in the hands of the US Government. As someone who had been raised by her parents to be a conscientious objector, this was fairly terrifying.

She wasn’t allowed to get her clothes back. In fact, she suspected that her entire outfit—her vintage blue peasant blouse from mom, the jeans she had borrowed from her sister Tracy, and her favorite wooden clogs—was gone for good. They said she might get her medal of St. Catherine back eventually. They had strongly suggested she should unwrap the thread from the thin braids in her hair, and, Kateri, juggling in her mind between dissenting again government interference and the possibility of contracting a biohazard disease, submitted.

She’d had those tiny braids wrapped for the past four years of college, one for each time she’d been arrested for leading a protest. With a few furtive tears, she acknowledged that that time in her life was probably over for good as she unwrapped the braids and handed the tangled thread over to the female agent monitoring the shower unit. Another compromise. Great.

When the agent gave her a pair of Wal-Mart sweats to wear instead, in pink and purple, it didn’t make her feel any better about her surrender.

After she was dressed, she was shown to another small cubicle somewhere in the bowels of the truck, and FBI Agent Carter Randolph, who, Kateri quickly discovered, had the personality of a two-by-four plank, came to interview her about what had happened at the uncle’s house. Of course, he was wearing a face mask and rubber gloves, which probably inhibited his personal interaction.

Kateri, who, due to life experience, knew a thing or two about talking to the feds, matched her behavior to his and answered his questions without any elaboration, just telling him what he wanted to know and not giving any extra details. She hoped she wasn’t sweating.

If they dig up my records and do a background check, I bet I’ll be their prime suspect. After all, she had willingly disobeyed abortion clinic access laws repeatedly during her college years, and her older siblings had been labeled as terrorists because they had organized nonviolent protests against abortion.

But the agent didn’t ask her any questions about her past, and after a while, Kateri realized that all the O’Donnells, who had been questioned as well, would probably corroborate what she’d told the agent: she’d never met Uncle Cass.

She’d been in his house only about fifteen minutes. By the time she’d even heard of the existence of Cassidy O’Donnell, he was already dead.

It took about two and a half hours for the truck to reach its destination.

That destination turned out to be some sort of massive bunker of a medical facility with no windows and no identification. She’d been examined by a doctor wearing a HEPA filter, her vital signs were taken, and then she was shown to a private bedroom, hooked up to an IV, and left alone with a stack of fashion magazines and a television.

Even if they didn’t know about or care about her activist background, how could she possibly trust these people who had locked her into this concrete bunker like a prisoner? For someone who was used to having her civil rights infringed, it wasn’t exactly easy to relax. And the thought of being killed by biohazard exposure. Well, to the daughter of an organic farmer, this was nothing but ironic. Serves me right for coming to Northern Virginia. . .

She didn’t open the magazines or turn on the television, just stared at the concrete block wall, trying not to give into paranoia and wondering what in the world she had done to get herself involved with Alex’s family and this crazy mess.

As the son of a Beltway employee involved in security, Alex had always known that the US government had many resources when it came to terrorist attacks, but he had never dreamed that he would be able to benefit directly from them. During the decontamination process and medical exam, he had looked around as much as possible and, after estimating the direction of the truck and the length it took to arrive at their destination, he had figured out that his family and Kateri were being treated at a facility somewhere west of Mt. Weather. That was the demarcation line for the estimated blast zone of a nuclear attack on Washington DC.

Once he was left alone in his hospital room, he had gotten out of bed and examined what he could of the room, including the mattress, which was premium (his tutorial with Mr. Bhatka had included what to look for in a good mattress), and concluded that they were in a pretty nice medical facility.

Maybe we’re at the same place where they’d treat the president if he were exposed to a biohazard. Cool.

“Feeling okay, Alex?”

Alex restrained his reflexive urge to jump and casually looked up at the tall FBI agent who’d just opened the door. “Yeah, I am.” He hopped back into bed and straightened out his IV line.

“Better not kink that tube or the nurse will get teed off,” the man said, sitting down in the chair next to the bed. He pointed to the facial mask he was wearing. “Sorry for this. The medical team’s making everyone wear one.”

Alex grinned. He figured he should try to get off on the right foot with the agent. “That’s okay. Your name is Furlow, right?”

“Yes, Agent Thomas Furlow.” For an FBI agent, he looked surprisingly friendly. “My partner and I are the ones they call in whenever there’s a biohazard investigation.”

“How often does that happen?” Alex asked.

Agent Furlow shrugged. “Enough so that it keeps us on our toes. But usually the cases aren’t fatal, as this one unfortunately was.” He cleared his throat.

“We’re probably going to ask you not to tell too many people how your uncle died. The public tends to panic over these sorts of incidents.”

“Yeah,” Alex said quietly. “So—how’s my mom doing?”

“She’s okay,” Agent Furlow said. “Seems like quite a lady.”

“She is that,” Alex said. “Can I go and see her?”

The agent hesitated, toyed with his blackberry. “I’m not sure if that’s possible.”

Ah. Alex cocked his head. “How long are we going to be here?”

“I’m afraid that ricin has a long incubation period. To be absolutely sure you’re safe, the medical team is probably going to want to keep you under observation for seventy-two hours.”

Three days. Alex whistled. “And during that whole time, we’re not allowed to talk to one another? Is there such a big risk of infection?”

Agent Furlow paused. “Well, it’s not exactly infection. I’m afraid that’s Bureau procedure after there’s been a biohazard incident that might be intentional.”

Alex absorbed this. “So you think that Uncle Cass’s death was the result of a deliberate assault with a biohazard weapon? Did you find something in his office?”

The agent’s eyelashes flickered, but he didn’t say yes or no.

Alex pressed on. “It wasn’t in that weird red envelope in his office, was it?”

Agent Furlow coughed. “I see you have your suspicions.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “I mean, his dying of the flu was too strange. He was such a big, healthy guy. So was the ricin he inhaled in that envelope?”

Agent Furlow tilted his head with a slight smile. “Okay, I could deny it, but I think it’ll come out in the investigation. So do you have any idea of how it got there?”

Alex shook his head. “Like I told you earlier, we had just arrived at the house minutes before you guys showed up. I was looking around his office and saw the envelope, but I didn’t really put anything together. I guess you’re working on finding out who sent it?”

“We will be doing that,” Agent Furlow promised. “I’m sorry you’re going to have to be stuck here for three days.”

“Yeah, that stinks. But you know, it won’t be so hard on us if—listen, are you sure I can’t talk to my family?”

“Bureau procedure dictates…”

Alex spread his hands. “Think about it. We just lost our uncle, suddenly and tragically. We’d had no warning—my girlfriend had just arrived from New Jersey an hour before we got the news. We dropped everything, drove up north and rushed up here to be with my aunt. I know my aunt’s a mess. There’s no way any of us could have had anything to do with his death. I mean, my kid brothers are going to be traumatized by this, and I’m sure my girlfriend’s freaking out. I understand why you have to quarantine us, but can’t you let us at least talk to each other?” He put his head on one side. “Can’t you talk to your chief and find out if you can make an exception, in this case? Otherwise, I’m sure the psychological pain of this on top of losing Uncle Cass is going to be too much for the rest of my family to handle.” In these situations, you had to know just what to say to get around the red tape. Gently hinting at civil lawsuits—more red tape—was sometimes a good strategy. So he’d heard.

Agent Furlow paused. “I can see your point, but standard protocol is…” he shook his head. “Well, you’re right. I can at least talk to the chief and see what he says, in this case.”

Alex smiled with all the Irish charm he could muster. “I really, truly appreciate it.”

But after the agent left, Alex didn’t relish his victory. He sank back onto the bed pillows, feeling his hands go cold at the thought of his near escape.

So the ricin that had killed Uncle Cass had been in that envelope. And I almost picked it up.

He really hoped the FBI would let him see Kateri soon.

Kateri was starting to feel herself shift into prison mode—not a good thing.

She wondered if the FBI would let her tell her parents where she was, at least that she was safe. Or suppose they discovered that she had been exposed to some freak biological virus? Suppose that it was fatal—or worse, chronic?

Slowly, all the government conspiracy movies she’d ever seen began to knit together and replay themselves in her mind. The US government erasing every trace of their existence in the outside world, while keeping them alive in a secret laboratory for study and observation…

Several times she had to snap out of it, tell herself that she was living in America, not Communist Russia, but as soon as she started drifting off, the entire movie would start again, in bad 60’s Technicolor. . . Agent Furlow somberly telling her parents that they would never see their daughter again. . . A desperate fight in the bunker for freedom. . . Alex in a yellow space suit escaping from the feds, leaping over tombstones. . .

“Kateri!”

Snapping out of it, she blinked to find a completely real Alex staring in her face and grinning. He was wearing bright red sweats and an IV tube was still taped to his arm, but that was the only Technicolor thing about him. “You okay?”

“Just replaying Capricorn One in my mind for the fortieth time,” Kateri said, rubbing her eyes.

“Serves you right for watching such lousy movies,” Alex said, hopping onto the side of the bed next to her. “How do you feel? No flu symptoms? No strange sore throat?”

“No, thank God,” Kateri said. She knew she didn’t have any symptoms, even though her brain had been doing its darndest in her paranoia to convince her otherwise.

“Hey Alex! Hey Kateri!” David and Sam tumbled in through the door. “Isn’t this a cool place? When do you think they’ll let us out? Do you think we’re underneath the ground?”

“Pipe down, barbarians,” Alex said. “So they let you guys out too? Where’re Mom and Dad?”

“Right here,” Mr. O’Donnell said, maneuvering Mrs. O’Donnell’s wheelchair through the door. “Good to see you all again!”

His hearty greeting made Kateri take a deep breath and try again to switch back to normality. People in conspiracy movies spoke in grim whispers, not in loud, cheerful voices. Besides, all the O’Donnells were wearing the same bright, terrible colors of sweatpants, and life was starting to feel more like an episode of Teletubbies.

Alex shut the heavy door behind his parents and they all settled themselves on or around Kateri’s bed. “So,” Alex said, “now we can talk.”

“Are you sure?” Kateri looked around her room suspiciously. “Are you sure this room isn’t bugged?”

“Highly doubtful,” Alex said, and his father nodded.

“I’m sure they have the capability to…” Kateri said, pointing at the light fixture where she had been positive that a camera was hidden.

“Oh, yeah, sure, they do. But I doubt they are,” Alex said.

“How do you know?” Kateri said sharply.

“I don’t know,” Alex said with a shrug. “But at some point, you have to trust. Otherwise, civilization and sanity break down.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Look, I know you’ve had some rotten experiences with law enforcement in the course of your career, but don’t let it poison your mind.”

“Besides, everything I’m going to say to you, I’m going to tell to the FBI myself in a few minutes anyhow,” Mr. O’Donnell said unexpectedly.

They all stared at him in silence. Mr. O’Donnell removed his glasses from his red-rimmed eyes, wiped the frames, and put them back on again.

“Not that it’s going to solve any problems,” Mrs. O’Donnell said resignedly.

“Otherwise, we would have told you all earlier.

“You’re going to tell us everything?” Kateri asked Mr. O’Donnell, trying not to sound as skeptical as she felt.

He nodded. “I will,” he said huskily. “I will. I never thought I would hurt anyone. I was just taking a risk…”

Kateri was stolid. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

“Yes,” Mr. O’Donnell bowed his head. “But in this case, it killed my brother,” he whispered.

Telling herself not to be so harsh, Kateri said, “I’m sorry.”

Mr. O’Donnell sighed heavily. “Okay. So here’s what happened.”

Alex edged closer to Kateri, who had fixed her entire attention on his dad.

She didn’t seem to like what she’d heard thus far. There was a deep furrow between her dark eyes.

“So that’s the whole story, so far as I can understand it,” Dad said, a bit wearily. “And I think at this point, I’d better tell the authorities everything I know.”

There was silence as this sank in.

“So that’s the end of the million dollars,” Sam said.

“It looks like it,” Dad said.

“Alan, I’m so sorry—” Mom began to say in an agonized voice but he shook his head abruptly.

“No, Kitty, stop. Don’t blame yourself. I absolutely forbid you to blame yourself. We needed to pay Cass what we owed him. No matter how we did it, he was going to be suspicious. He chose to do what he did.” His voice started to break, but he managed to steady it.

After a silence had passed, Sam said, hesitantly, “Dad. Are we going to have to give back the hotel, too?”

“Not necessarily,” Mom said, drying her eyes with a tissue. “What we have to do is make the hotel work. If we can make money with it, we can continue to pay off the mortgage. It’ll be tight, but we’ll get by.” She squeezed her husband’s hand, and said steadily, “Well! It’s been an interesting adventure, being rich, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to last.”

Dad looked at Kateri. “I’m sorry you had to be part of this madness.”

She shrugged, with what Alex knew was pretended nonchalance. “These things happen.” She didn’t say anything else.

There was a knock on the door, and a nurse, still masked, poked her head inside. “Excuse me. I’m afraid we need everyone to return to their rooms for a medical checkup. It will only take a few minutes.”

“That’s fine,” Dad said, and Sam and David, possessed by restless energy, got up and began fighting almost immediately.

As his mom began to remonstrate with them, Alex pulled Kateri aside.

“Look, I need to apologize,” he said. “You were right. You saved my life back there in Uncle Cass’s office. If I had touched that envelope, I might be dead now.”

“Don’t say that,” Kateri muttered, shivering. “I’m completely paranoid already. We won’t be given the all-clear for another forty-eight hours.”

“But do you forgive me, for being—well, pigheaded, to choose a word?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.” He squeezed her hand and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

Alex had intended to be in the room when his dad confessed to the FBI, but during the medical checkup, the doctor found some sort of noise in Alex’s lungs that concerned him and ordered another set of tests to be run. “After all, you were in that study where they found the ricin longer than anyone else,” he said testily when Alex argued with him. Alex insisted that it was probably just his seasonal allergies, but the doctor was adamant. Irish charm might sway the feds, but not the already-heavily-litigated-against medical profession.

So Alex had to sit and have his blood drawn (again) and wait for the tests to come back. There hadn’t been time to talk to Dad earlier. And by the time Alex was pronounced free to move around again, Dad’s room was empty and Mom said he had gone speak to Agent Furlow.

Mom was really worried about Aunt Mona, so after wheeling her into his tearful aunt’s room, Alex went back to see Kateri, where he confided his fears.

“Well,” Kateri said, with some hesitation. “Sometimes doing the right thing will get you in trouble. And your dad is willing to risk that.”

“Yeah,” Alex conceded. “I guess it’s just the O’Donnell clannishness rising up in me. I was raised to be loyal.” He scratched his arms fitfully. “I wish I could be there with him,” he said again.

Kateri didn’t say anything but Alex knew she was thinking the same thing he was: CKTC.

Having secured permission for the O’Donnells and Kateri to see one another, Agent Furlow continued to make himself popular when he recommended, over Agent Randolph’s objections, that the family be allowed to have access to a video game console. So while Alex waited for his dad to return, he relieved his anxiety by creaming Sam and David in a Japanese anime game involving crash-testing tanks. Kateri even consented to watch them, so they were all piled on the bed in Alex’s room. Eventually they were joined by Mom, who had been allowed to have crochet needles and yarn (again, thanks to Agent Furlow’s thoughtfulness). She sat in her chair working on a potholder in red and black and making cheerful small talk with Kateri. So they were all there when Dad finally returned, after speaking with the FBI for nearly three hours.

Dad told them that he had had to reconstruct his visits to the website verbally, since computers that could connect to the internet were disallowed in this facility. “Once we’re given the all-clear, I told them I’d come to the FBI headquarters and show them more. But I think I gave them what they need in order to investigate Cass’s death.” He put his head to one side. “Also, I’m not sure about this, but I get the idea that Agent Furlow thinks he knows who the website belongs to.”

“Who?” Sam asked.

“He mentioned there’s a ring of cyberthieves the FBI has been after. He seems to think I might have stumbled onto their website.”

“Cyberthieves?” Kateri repeated.

“Criminals who hack into banks, steal personal identities, run internet scams, that sort of thing,” his dad explained. “Most of them are small operators, but apparently there’s a group of them who work together to commit larger crimes.”

“Like stealing millions of dollars? But where do they steal the money from?”

David asked. His dad shrugged.

“There are different ways cyberthieves have of harvesting money. Sometimes they hack into a banking system and deduct a half-cent from each account. That can translate into a lot of money, depending on the size of the banking system.”

David whistled.

“So you didn’t just find their website,” Alex said. “You found their online bank. Where they store their money.”

“I’m just hazarding a guess,” Dad said. “You know how federal agents are: they never want to tell you anything for certain. But Agent Furlow seemed to feel comfortable telling me a little more.”

“So these criminals have millions of dollars, and they don’t mind killing people,” Alex was thinking hard.

Dad nodded. “By the way, Agent Furlow told me that the ricin did come in an envelope from the Sundance Fun Foundation, just like our check did. But this envelope was red, padded, and heavily taped.”

Alex, his brothers, and Kateri exchanged glances.

Dad put his head to one side. “I’m wondering if the red envelope was meant to be a warning. In other words, if you’re using the online bank and you do something wrong when you’re making a transaction—such as not logging out correctly—the site administrators will send you a red envelope of ricin. Someone who’s part of the ring of cyberthieves will know they’ve done something wrong, and would know not to open it…”

“But Uncle Cass was an outsider, so he didn’t know,” Alex finished.

Dad didn’t say anything, just touched Mom’s hand. She shook her head and gave him a familiar look, saying softly, “The luck of the Irish saved you that time, Alan.”

“Let’s hope that luck holds out,” was all Dad said. Kateri narrowed her eyes.

Alex recognized too well what she was thinking: what was his dad going to do next?