It’s never been enough. 

Enough what?

Enough husbands, enough men?  Enough pain, enough control?  Enough fun for her?  Or enough to please her mother?  

When I wake up the next morning the sun streams in through the window that faces over the backyard.  Keol’s door is open and he isn’t inside.  Nua is not here either.  I stretch, staring at the ceiling, and then look out my window.  

Ava’s on the back porch.  She’s alone, sunglasses perched on her nose, and I exhale.  I should talk to her, shouldn’t I?

I go down the stairs and towards the back door.  She’s leaning with her elbows braced on the railing, and in her hands is a beer can instead of a cigarette.  I hesitate before touching the handle to the door, wondering if I’m allowed to go out because she hasn’t told me I can.  But I’m sick of tiptoeing around this place, and why does it even matter, anyway?

“Hey,” I say quietly, and she looks at me.  She’s squinting a little against the light, and doesn’t look too upset that I came outside without her permission.  “Hi.”

“What are you looking at?” I ask, and her eyes run over the flowers.  She sighs.  “Nothing.”

She takes another sip from her can, and I smile slightly.  “Beer today, no cigarette?”

She makes a noise as she finishes swallowing.  “Keol stole my lighter.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” she sighs again, turning around so she’s leaning against the railing.  I keep looking out at the garden, feeling her eyes on me.  Finally she says quietly, “I know you know about my brother.”

I look at the ground below us, and she smiles a little, swirling the beer around in the can a little before taking a sip.  “I was kind of hoping if I looked into your sister, I’d be able to find my brother, too.  Like they were somehow connected, just for me to find.  Like it’s a fairy tale that miraculously all works out in the end.”

I swallow, not sure of what she’s about to say, and then she places the beer can on the railing and in one smooth movement crushes it with the palm of her hand.  “Come on.  I’ve gotta show you something.”

My heart leaps into my throat but I’m not going to start disobeying her now; not when she could be about to show me something that I don’t dare hope for.  She leads me through the house and I think we’re going to her bedroom, but we stop on the second floor and she leads me into the library.

We go back into it, further and further until she suddenly turns and brings me into a small room that’s decorated like an office, with a rich brown desk and soft chairs.  Ava goes behind the desk, fiddles with something, and I look at one of the papers on her desk.  “Ava LeGatte?”

She reaches up and pulls the papers away before I can read any more, but smiles as she rifles through her desk.  She has her key ring out again, the same one as yesterday.  “We’ve been married, what, a month and a half now, you never knew my last name?”

I shrug, and she grins, straightening up.  “Well, welcome to the family, Aberworth Ahman-LeGatte.”  She tosses a manilla folder onto her desk.  “There you go.”

“What is this?” I ask quietly, and she grins again, although it’s slightly colder than before.  “Abigala.”

My breath catches and I reach for the folder, but before I can take it she slams her hand on top of it.  “Aber.”

I jump.  “What?”

“Were you lying when you told me you were eighteen?”

I blink.  “What?  No.”

She raises her eyebrows at me, examining my face, and I don’t know what to do.  Why would I lie about my age, especially about being old enough to marry and young enough to be worth marrying?

But after a moment Ava slowly lifts her hand, and I grab the folder off the desk before she can stop me again and turn away from her to devour the contents inside.  Once I flip open the cover, though, I freeze.  

What is this, a resume?  Abigala’s never had a real job like this before, not one that needed a resume.  But it’s hers, it says Abigala Ahman at the top, and it says Assistant to National Agencies Director underneath, and I flip past it.  And then I see a photo of her, and a document she’s signed, and then I see a family document that just says mother and father and brother, no names, and four other lines coming off of Abigala’s name.  I furrow my eyebrows, and flip the page over, but there’s nothing on the back.  The paper underneath it, though, is a-

“Marriage certificate,” I murmur, one of the articles slipping out of the folder and sliding to the ground.  “She got married, she took husbands?”

“Four of ’em,” says Ava in a dry sarcastic tone that reminds me of Keol.  “At once.  Worse than me, even.  Weren’t expecting that, were you?”

“But…”  My voice trails off.  I don’t know what to say.  She’s always promised me that she would never take a husband, never buy a boy off the market that treats us like goods to be wagered with.  There’s enough of that, she always said, there’s enough suffering in the world without treating the ones we need to protect like dirt.  

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“How did you find this?” I ask, turning back to her, and Ava laughs.  It’s cold and I don’t like it, and she says, “We work in the same government.” 

Government?  Abigala would never work in the government.  I look back down at the papers, my fingers shaking.  Keol’s voice is ringing in my head, his accusation towards me, towards her, your stupid twin who’s probably either dead or as married and manipulative as Ava is, no, that’s not true, is it?

“Oh, and if you keep reading,” Ava’s voice penetrates through my thoughts, “you’ll see you’re an uncle, twice over already.  Abigala’s going to be very busy in a few years, isn’t she?”

I sink down into one of the squishy chairs.  Abigala’s gotten her wish, she has a job, a good job, by the looks of it, but it doesn’t look like she’s doing good with it.  Government?  She’s looking for our parents, she must be, they got taken away, they’re probably in jail, she’s trying to get them back.  But she’s married, given two embryos for artificial development, who knows how long it’s been since the scientists have cultivated them but when they’re a year old they’re all going back to her.  She promised me she’d never get married but now she’s working in the government as the assistant to the National Agencies Director, whatever that means, and I’m be stuck here, unable to reach her, unable to understand what she did, what happened, why.  

“Your perfect sister’s a trophy,” says Ava.  “The way you wanted to find her, I thought she might actually be good.  And that gave me hope for Penny.  Maybe he went somewhere where his wife treated him good.”

Penny, her brother, the first time I’ve ever heard her say his name.

“But there’s no one good in the world, anymore, is there, Aber?” she says, her voice rising to a scream.  “None of her husbands are Penny.  I can’t find a damn thing about Penny, anywhere, so he’s probably stuck with a shit wife who just uses him and abuses him or else he’s dead, but at least your perfect Abigala’s alive and thriving.”

“Why are you mad at me?” I cry, my eyes filling with tears as I clutch the folder of Abigala information so hard it wrinkles, and I hear Ava gasp with the effort of not letting herself cry.  “I’m a shit wife, too.”

I look up at her.  She’s fallen into her chair behind her desk, leaning against it with her head in her hands, and I shake my head.  “No, you’re not.”

“You hate me,” she whispers.  “Because I don’t let you do anything yourself.  And Nua, too.  And Keol hates me, I know he does, because I can’t do anything more for him.”

“Trust me, Keol does not hate you.”

“Love has nothing to do with this,” she shoots back.  The same thing she said to me that night.  “We might be attracted to each other, but there’s no way any one of us would care about the others if we weren’t stuck in this stupid house, no way we’d care about each other if we didn’t have to.”

I let the words sink into my brain, wondering if they’re real or not, but I can’t concentrate; Abigala’s name, voice, face is pounding in my head.  Then I realize it’s not a pounding in my head but a noise in real life; Ava is coughing again, but more violently than I’ve ever seen.  

“Ava.”  I stand up, reaching for her, but she swats me away, then wipes her eyes.  “No.”

“Ava,” I say again quietly, staring at her hands.  She lowers them from her eyes, then swallows at the blood that’s splattered against them.  She touches her lips gently, then shakes her head, grabbing a tissue.  “No.  It’s fine, I’m fine.”

“You’re sick,” I say quietly, and she laughs, although it’s slightly raspy.  “I’m not.”

“Nua said that’s why you live here with your mother,” I say, watching her wipe her hands off.  She just coughed up blood, how can she say she’s not sick, how stupid does she think I am?  “For your lungs, because you’re dying.”

“Dying?  Nua’s delusional,” she answers, gesturing for the folder back.  I hesitate; she gestures again, and I reluctantly close it and give it to her.  She slides it back in her desk and locks the drawer.  “My mother is also delusional.  And so are you if you think that you have to worry about me.”

“Why wouldn’t I worry about you?”

She raises her eyebrows at me.  “You’re trapped here, Aber, why do you care what happens to the person who’s trapping you?”

“You aren’t trapping me,” I say.  “Your mother is.  And she’s keeping you here, too.  You’re just as trapped as we are.”

She laughs, leaning back in her chair, and swallows another cough.  “No, I’m not.”

“You didn’t want to get married,” I shoot back, standing up so I’m looking down at her.  “You didn’t want to take two husbands and then two more.  You don’t want children.  You can’t even go into town whenever you want, you work from home, everything you do, you have to ask your mother.  You don’t want to be here.  And yet you are.”

“At least I can ask,” she answers back.  “And I can work, and I can go places, and I can smoke, and I can choose who I have sex with and who I don’t.  I’m more free than you.  You need to worry about yourself.”

“More free than me isn’t really that difficult,” I say, sitting back down with a sigh.  “If your mother stopped making you do things you don’t want to do, you’d be able to stop making us do things we don’t want to do.”

“Keol’s fine being with me,” she says, almost hissing through her teeth.  “Nua, though?  He’s stuck.  He doesn’t want to be here, he doesn’t want anything to do with me, but he can never leave.  And you, you want to go and find your sister again and be happy, but you can’t.  I can’t help you.  I can only wait until I have to hurt you.”

“But you don’t want to,” I say back, quietly.  I’m not sure what this argument is about, if it’s an argument at all.  “You feel bad.  That means you care.  And trust me, Ava, there’s a lot of people in the world who think that having their wife care for them is too big of a dream.”

She scratches her head, then lets her hand fall onto the desk.  “And that’s the problem.  I still take part in this ritual that demeans you.”

“But you didn’t choose to,” I say, my voice gentle.  “You’re upset that you can’t give us choice, but you never really had a choice at all, either.”

“I chose you.”

“And if it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else.  But you had to pick someone.  You couldn’t say no.  And that’s the problem.  It’s your mother, don’t you get it?  If we were all somewhere else, without her, we’d love each other even better than we do now.”

She shakes her head, but closes her eyes as if she can’t bear to face my argument any longer.  I look at her.  “How can you think that everything’s your fault even knowing what your mother did to your twin?”

Her eyes snap open and she stands straight up, her chair going backwards into the wall behind her.  “You don’t talk about him.”

I raise my eyebrows at her, and she leans on the desk, staring at me with rage flickering through her eyes until she manages to take a deep breath.  She says quietly, her voice low, “I’m never going to be as trapped as you are.  All of you.”

I don’t answer.

“I can handle my mother,” she says quietly.  “But if I can’t keep you safe…”

She trails off.  Her index finger starts tapping against the desk, over and over and over, and then she says softly, “he’d never forgive me.”

I look down at my hands.  

“And I’d never forgive myself,” she finishes, taking a breath.  And then with that, she leaves me alone in the room.  

I stare at the wall for a moment.  I know that I’m right.  But what do I have to gain by telling her this?  She’s right.  I should be worrying about myself, instead of her, instead of my wife, of all people.  

But I’m right, too.  She didn’t want to be a wife.  She didn’t want her brother to get sold away.  And to protect us, to protect her unwilling husbands from the person who’s really behind all of this, is the least she could do to honor him.  

I go behind the desk, fruitlessly trying the drawers even knowing they’re locked.  I didn’t even get through everything that was in the folder before we started yelling at each other.  Before I leave, though, I see a little paper halfway under the desk, and I bend over to pick it up.  It’s the scrap of paper that had fallen out before I gave the folder back to her.  No information, nothing about her husbands or her career, just a picture of Abigala, with her name underneath.  She’s smiling.  She looks happy.  

I decide to keep this one for myself.