I wake up next to Nua the next day, but not Ava. No one else is in the room, either, and I roll over, rubbing my eyes against the sun, and try to fall asleep until Nua wakes up. He opens his eyes, sees that I’m up, and murmurs, “Hey.”

“It’s weird that we’re back, right?” I whisper, and he smiles, closing his eyes again. “Are you asking if it’s just you? Because it’s not just you.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “Good. I guess.”

“Abigala looks just like you,” he says after a moment, rolling onto his back, and I laugh, shaking my head. “No she doesn’t.”

“Not like Penny and Ava,” he concedes, sitting up and running his fingers through his hair so it’s more tousled and tangled than ever. “But still.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You think Bayan will bring us breakfast?” he asks, looking down at me, and I scoff. “I hope not.”

He does. He is back up to Ava’s bedroom with a tray laden with plates of toast and eggs a few minutes later, and Nua rolls his eyes at me and then goes into the bathroom. I go to sit on the couch with Bayan, and we’re quiet for a little bit, eating, even when Nua comes to join us. He takes a slice of toast and sits cross-legged on the ground by the table and asks, “How’s Taymer?”

“Good,” says Bayan softly. I raise my eyebrows at Nua but he just shrugs, taking another bite, and then there’s a knock at the bedroom door. Abigala pops in. “Aber. Hey, Aber.”

“Hey,” I say with a slight smile, turning to her. She grins too. “Do you wanna go for a walk?”

I blink, and then shrug. “Sure.”

So we go for a walk. She takes me down the stairs, and out the back door, and right into the flower garden. The last time I was in the flower garden was when Ava asked me and Nua to find Penny. I remember looking out the back window at it, every day, when Nua and I were alone in the house. Ava was alive then, but we didn’t know it, and then she was gone, and then we found her again. I stand there for a second, looking at the flowers, and then Abigala puts her hand on my shoulder. I turn to her, and my heart sinks.

“Did you just take me out here to talk to her?” I say, and Abigala shrugs, shaking her head. Miss Lilly comes up to us. “Aberworth. Abigala. It’s good to see you two together again.”

“Why’d you separate us in the first place, then?” I mutter, and she hears. She smiles slightly, and changes the subject. “Do you have enough space up there, Aberworth, all of you squeezed into Ava’s room?”

“It’s not really squeezing, it’s a pretty big room.”

“And you’ve spread out to your old bedroom too,” she says, ignoring the cynicism in my voice. “That’s good.”

She turns, and jerks her head for us to follow. “I heard you two had a bit of a spat yesterday, over the choices you both have made in the past few months.”

I glare at Abigala; she shrugs and shakes her head again.

“You’re both young,” continues Lilly. I don’t know where we’re going, we’re just wandering past the fountain towards the pool. “You both had to make a lot of decisions, big decisions, very quickly. And it can be easy to fall into doubt, or regrets.”

“I don’t regret anything,” I say. Lilly looks back at me, her lips curving into a slight smile. “Really? Nothing?”

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She wants me to blush. I will myself not to.

“What about you, Abigala?” she asks after a moment, looking at my sister, and my sister looks at me. Then she shakes her head. “No.”

I shake my head too, and look away.

“Good,” says Lilly with another grin. “You’re both very smart young people. But as you get older you might think back on some things, and wonder if you could have done different, or more. Like sometimes, myself, I wonder what else I could have done for my husband, when he was ill.”

You could have not poisoned him. I bite my tongue.

“I just don’t want you two,” says Lilly, “to have any regrets. In the future.”

“Like what?” I ask. Lilly looks at me, and shrugs. “I don’t know, Aber. Like what?”

I don’t answer. Abigala looks at me, and then at my mother-in-law. “Everything is complicated, Aber. Even what Mom and Dad were doing.”

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t complicated. They were taking care of people. People who needed protection from you.”

Lilly smiles sightly when I look at her, and sighs and shakes her head. “Aber, please. This is about the future. The greater good.”

“No, it’s not,” I say. “You’re trying to make it sound noble and grand, like you’re the good guys in one of Nua’s books. You’re not. You were stealing children from their families and marrying them off, and then tracking them down when they ran away.”

“No, Aber,” says Abigala frustratedly. “I told you. We saw the worst of it. But it wasn’t like that, most of it wasn’t like that. There are things we need to fix, like what happened to our boys. We know that that’s a problem. But most of it isn’t like that.”

“And you came here to fix ithe parts that are?” I say.

“Yes.”

“How is marrying four boys fixing it?”

Abigala flares her nostrils, she does that when she’s mad, she has never done it at me before. “Aber.”

“No, because it seems to me,” I say over her, “like you’re trying to convince me of something, and I don’t know what you’re trying to convince me of.”

“We’re not,” says Abigala softly. “We just want you to understand.”

“I do understand,” I say. “I know why you did what you did, Abigala, and it was wrong, and you shouldn’t have done it. You have to see it from my perspective. You betrayed everyone we promised to take care of in that house, including me. Including Mom and Dad.”

Abigala bites her lip, glancing at Miss Lilly, and I make a noise in frustration. “No, Abi, don’t look at her, look at me.”

And she does. Miss Lilly’s eyes narrow slightly. “Don’t speak to your sister that way.”

“Don’t speak to me that way,” I answer, and she looks at me. Once that look would have frightened me, but now I am just angry. “God, I don’t know why we came back.”

“You came back for me,” says Abigala quietly, and I shrug. “Yeah. We thought you might be in danger. Turns out you’re better than you’ve ever been.”

She just stares at me, hurt in her eyes, but I can’t stomach it, not right now. She cannot make me feel bad about this, no, nothing she or Lilly does right now can make me any less angry, or any less right.

“You’re treading in dangerous waters here,” says Lilly finally, her voice low. “I told you that, months ago, before your little escapade, although back then I was debating more what to do with the other one.”

“I think Ava needs Nua more than she needs me,” I say softly. “And I think she needs Penny more than you need her. So if there is a decision to be made, don’t be so sure you’d win.”

“No,” says Lilly. “I don’t need her. I don’t need my son, either. I just need the two of you.”

“Why?”

Lilly laughs. It echoes off of I don’t know what, maybe it just reverberates in my mind. “I won’t ruin the fun.”

She leaves us. I hear her heels clicking away on the deck of the pool before she steps into the grass, and after a moment Abigala says hesitantly, “Aber.”

I shake my head. I take a deep breath of fresh non-smoky air, and I go back inside.