Miss Lilly is angry. She has not locked us in our room again, but I know that I and Nua and Ava and Penny and Bayan, especially Bayan, can tell when she is angry. For the entire night and next day he does not let the baby alone. He holds him, all the time, he is silent, just cradling Julian in his arms, looking down at him or over at Penny or at the wall or at nothing. We don’t know what to do with him, other than to feed him or change him or bounce him or burp him, and Bayan does it all. He does not smile and he does not speak and he does not let anyone else take the baby from him.

And Lilly is angry. She does not know where Sloan went and where she got the baby from or who the baby is or what to do with it, but she does not want a baby in her house. Ava is slightly upset, too, but on behalf of Marissa. “You took her baby from her,” she says, over and over, and Penny shakes his head calmly. “We took him from Nerev. Nerev asked us to bring him to his brother-in-law.”

“Why would he ask you to do that?”

“He has a sister,” Sloan tries to explain. “He has an older sister, who has a few kids of her own, and he’s good friends with, he trusts, one of her husbands, he knows that they’ll take care of him.”

“What about Marissa?” says Ava, over and over. “You took Julian away from her, he needs to be with his mother, she’s supposed to feed him.”

“Nerev’s sister has everything they need,” says Sloan. Ava shakes her head, and looks at the baby in Bayan’s arms, and then up at Bayan. He does not say anything.

He falls asleep on the couch that night with the baby still on his lap. Ava is pacing, rubbing her head, late into the night. Sloan and Penny have gone down to the backyard and Nua is in the library and I am in bed, and Bayan is curled up asleep on the couch with the baby, and Ava is pacing. I stare at the ceiling, waiting for Ava to come into my peripheral vision and then leave it again, and I know she is shaking for a smoke, I know she has never wanted a cigarette in these past few months more than right now. The baby has not cried, it has not made much noise, it seems to like Bayan, and now it is asleep, and Ava is pacing. Finally she comes over to me and sits by my feet and says, “Was that the right thing to do, Aber?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, my voice quiet. I don’t want to wake up Julian, or Bayan. “I mean, they’re right, he can’t grow up underground, and if Nerev trusts his brother-in-law, and they already have kids, they’ll take care of him. Marissa will come up and find him when she’s ready.”

“I don’t know if she ever will be,” says Ava. “She needs to get better, from giving birth, and then she has her mother to worry about, that’s why she was down with Shan in the first place.”

“Ava, Julian was part of the reason you said you needed to come back here in the first place, to find a safe place for him.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says after a moment. “I just didn’t think about it, that Marissa would give him away. I don’t think she would give him away.”

“Sloan said she gave him to her.”

“No, she said Nerev gave him to her.”

“Nerev wouldn’t take Julian away from Marissa, Ava.”

Ava sighs, and looks over to the couch where Bayan is sleeping. “Okay. Yeah. But I’m going with him, then.”

“Going where?” I ask, and she sighs, rubbing her eyes. “Bayan’ll bring Julian to Nerev’s family. I’m gonna have to go with them, to meet them, and know where they are.”

“Okay,” I say softly, as she looks at me. “But you’re not in charge of everything, Ava. If this was what they decided, we have to let Bayan take him to Nerev’s sister.”

“You say my name a lot,” she whispers, and I smile slightly. “What do you want me to say, Miss?”

“No,” she says with a tired laugh, and comes to lie down next to me in bed.

The next day, after breakfast, Bayan leaves the house with Ava and with the baby. They go driving away to find Nerev’s sister, and Sloan takes a nap in Ava’s bed. Penny and Nua and I go down to the backyard to avoid Miss Lilly, and Nua takes a deep breath when we go out to the back porch. “Did you know about this?”

“Not really,” answers Penny. “I knew they were going to do something, though. Sloan always has a look in her eye when she’s planning something.”

“Do you know who Nerev’s sister is?” I ask, and he shrugs. “Nope.”

“Ava was mad,” says Nua to me, and I sigh. “I think she’s just worried for Marissa.”

“When she’s well enough they’ll come up,” says Penny. “That’s part of the plan. They just, they wanted the baby to see the sun.”

We’re quiet for a moment, and then Penny moves away. He goes down the porch steps and into the grass, and Nua and I follow him. He looks at the flower garden, and says, “Her husband built that.”

“Gave her the idea, yeah,” murmurs Nua after a moment. He glances at me, and then Penny looks back at us too. A slight breeze blows through, ruffling Nua’s hair and lifting a few pieces of Penny’s off his shoulders, and I look at the flowers too. I remember when we came out here, me and Ava and Nua, and she asked us to find Penny. Now here we are, with him, all back home.

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“What was he like?” asks Penny after a moment, quietly, and I look at Nua. He smiles a little, and we both just think. Finally Nua says, “He was kind of a dick.”

“Nua,” I say, and he shrugs. “He was.”

“Yeah, but you can’t just say that,” I protest, and Penny laughs, tilting his face up to the sky. When he closes his eyes he looks just like his sister. “Did he take care of her?”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “He was a dick to us, but not to her.”

“She didn’t give a shit about me when I got there,” says Nua. “He was already sleeping in her room and sitting at her right hand at the table. They liked to go down to the pool, or the beach in the mornings to watch the sunrise.”

“He was from an agency,” I say softly. “So he didn’t really expect much.”

“I feel like people can learn to love each other,” says Penny quietly. “If the timing’s right. And if neither of them are a dick.”

Nua laughs, and I smile. I go to the fountain and sit down on the ledge. This is where I got married. Nua sits on the ground like he normally does, and leans his head back against the stone. “They worked well together. They were both young, and angry.”

“We’re still young and angry,” says Penny, and I smile. A cloud passes in front of the sun, and I look up at it. He sighs, and says, “I just, I never had someone like that, so when she came to me, when she told me, I was just surprised. And now she has three of you.”

“Two, now,” says Nua under his breath, and I glance at Penny. “What about Bayan?”

Nua looks up at him too, but Penny just laughs, leaning his head back. “Bayan, I.”

He licks his lips, and sighs. “I thought about Bayan every day. And he thought about me, but I was just a kid when I left, and he didn’t think that he should remember me like that, last time I saw him he was twenty-two and I was seventeen, and then, you know, it’s been three years now, and…it’s different.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Nua.

“I don’t know,” he says with a sigh, and then a smile. He picks at something on his clothes, and shakes his head. “I don’t know, I mean. He’s just got his hands full right now. With Julian, and Ava.”

“He’ll always have his hands full with Ava,” says Nua, and I smile. “So will we.”

“So will we,” agrees Penny. “I don’t know what she’s going to do.”

“About what?” asks Nua.

“Any of it,” says Penny. “All of it. Find a place for Julian and for Marissa and Nerev, and find a place for everyone else down there in Shan. And everyone else up here, too, like the people your parents helped, Aber.”

“My sister was trying to tell me that it’s not all bad,” I say. “Like, I have a bad impression of marriage because of all those boys I knew growing up, but that’s just a minority that I shouldn’t worry about.”

“It’s definitely a minority,” says Penny after a moment of thinking. “But it’s not one that we should ignore.”

“How many people are out there like Nerev and Marissa?” asks Nua. “If her mother wasn’t hunting them down like Lilly, if they could just be normal and not in Shan.”

“More than the people like me,” says Penny. “Sometimes even the agency matches work out. But sometimes they don’t. And sometimes there’s kidnapping and selling and manipulative contracts and people who get stuck, until they can find a way away.”

“Keol’s agency match worked out,” I say softly. “If only the mother of the bride wasn’t such a bitch.”

Penny laughs. “God, yeah, isn’t that always the problem.”

“Is it?” asks Nua, looking at Penny, and I look at him too. I wonder if he’ll ever tell us anything about his wife, his mother-in-law, what happened to him in those few months that he was married and living with a strange woman whom his own mother gave him to, but now he just rolls his eyes and shakes his head again. “Oh, usually, yeah.”

And Nua looks at me, and then he smiles, leaning his head back against the wall of the fountain, and closes his eyes.

Bayan comes home later that afternoon, with Ava, and without Julian. She comes out to sit next to me by the pool; Nua and Penny have gone inside by then, but I have my feet hanging over the edge into the water, thinking about the day Keol died, when she sits next to me. I jump, looking up at her, and she smiles a little, leaning over to put her head on my shoulder. “We found his sister.”

“Nerev’s?” I ask, leaning my head against hers, and she nods. The sun is setting behind the trees, and then the sliding door on the back porch opens again. We both look over at it; it’s Bayan, and he raises his head so he can see us, and gestures inside, and then leaves.

“Dinner, I guess,” says Ava with a sigh. She pulls her feet out of the pool and stands, and I look up at her, squinting in the fading sunlight. “Are you mad at Bayan?”

“No,” she says with a smile, holding her hand out for me. I take it, and she pulls me up. “Not at all. But my mother is. It was…I don’t know. I don’t know how it could have been done different, but it was a bad idea to bring the baby here.”

“No other choice,” I murmur, and she nods, and we go in for dinner.

Neither Bayan nor Sloan eats with us tonight. Lilly does, but she does not say much. The table is laid and we serve ourselves and eat in near silence, until Lilly is finished. She lays her fork and knife down on her plate and says, “Aberworth. Abigala. Ava. Penrin.”

We all look at her. I see Abigala glance at me, and I look at Ava, and I see Nua looking at me too. I look back at Lilly, and she says, “I’m going to take you into the city tomorrow.”

No one answers. Nua is the only person she’s not talking to, and he is silent. After a moment Ava says, “Why?”

“I have some things to show you,” says Lilly simply. Ava furrows her eyebrows. “Like what?”

“You’ll see,” says Lilly, rising. “Bayan will drive us. Be ready at ten tomorrow morning.”

She leaves. It is quiet. I look at Abigala, but she shrugs. Penny looks at his sister, and says, “What?”

Ava shrugs too. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”