Excerpt: His Father's Son

Death affected different people in different ways. The boy was quiet but not diffident. He was still grieving. And he was lonely, too. That much was obvious. Alfred would have reached out, but decades of English reserve and the innate knowledge the boy would not have welcomed it kept him at arm’s length. Instinct told him Master Wayne wished for his butler to develop some kind of rapport with the boy, to be a mentor or a father figure of sorts. Yet instinct also told Alfred it was not the butler the boy desperately needed.