For a long time, Lord John Grey and Jamie Fraser had carried the weight of a rupture neither of them could easily name. Pride, grief, and old wounds stood between them like a wall. John, usually controlled and measured, admitted that stubbornness had run through his family, joking bitterly that even his grandsire, the man beheaded at Tower Hill, had never apologized in his life. Jamie listened, still guarded, as both men circled the truth they had avoided for too long.