“It’s a book,” Nua tells me. “Not a very good book, but it’s a book. You’re torn between the women in your life. I’ve read stuff like this before.”

“It’s not funny,” I tell him. He laughs anyway.

Ava and Abigala are arguing at every possible turn. Abigala is not pleased. She was Miss Lilly’s assistant for months, even without my or Ava’s knowing, and she thinks she should be in charge now. Ava just laughs whenever she brings it up, and one day I am sitting in Ava’s office with the both of them, wondering if I am supposed to be mediating, but there is not much I can do because I cannot get a word in edgewise.

“She started to trust me,” says Abigala, “because you wouldn’t trust her.”

“And I was right not to trust her, and you were stupid to,” says Ava back. I rub my eyes, this has been going on for weeks; this is not how I wanted to get Abigala back. “I’m doing this now because I’m her daughter, and because I want to do it right.”

“Just because you’re her daughter doesn’t make you qualified. You have no idea what you’re doing. You’re going to make it all worse.”

“It’ll be difficult to make it worse than what Lilly did.”

“We were making progress. Me and her.”

“Please,” says Ava. I tilt my head back to the ceiling and squeeze my eyes shut. When they get into it there’s no stopping them. “If things were going so well you wouldn’t have been able to get married four times at once.”

“That’s not-”

“Where are your husbands, Abigala?” asks Ava, raising her voice. “Just tell me. Let me know, let me make sure they’re okay, and legal, and that you never hurt them, and then I’ll trust you.”

Abigala makes a frustrated noise. “Aber.”

“What?” I say in exasperation. Abigala waves her hands at me, and I groan. “I don’t know what you want me to say. She’s right.”

“You’re taking her side?”

“Of course I’m taking her side. No, actually, I’m taking your husbands’ side.”

“What?” says Abigala, her voice going louder too, and I take a deep breath. “Look, Abi, the fact that you won’t tell us who your husbands are or where they’re living and that you just keep saying that Lilly told you to keep them safe makes us think they aren’t very safe. Or that they weren’t, not after you came along.”

“How could you think that?” whispers Abigala, I can see genuine hurt in her eyes, and Ava scoffs. “Because you’re not giving us any other choice, Miss Ahman. I should be throwing you in jail, you’re lucky I’m only considering house arrest.”

“House arrest?” says Abigala in shock at the same time I look up at Ava. “Really?”

“I have to make an example,” says Ava decisively. “How can I claim to be cracking down on the abuse within this entire system while I have an abuser living completely free in my home?”

Abigala’s jaw drops, and she shakes her head, she looks at me. I do not say anything. She makes a noise in anger and storms out of the office. I lean my head back and groan.

Two weeks later it is July fifth, and it is Ava and Penny’s birthday. He wakes us up by jumping onto the bed and wrestling his sister out of it and she whacks him hard with her pillow as they go down, and then he tells her to put on a bathing suit and meet him in the pool. Nua groans, loudly, when he runs out of the room, and Ava laughs from the floor. “Oh, let him, he hasn’t celebrated in years.”

Nua opens one eye and looks up at me, as Ava pulls herself to her feet, and then smiles and closes it again.

Bayan shows Taymer how to make Ava’s favorite cake, and then they make Penny’s favorite dinner, too, later on in the day. The morning is spent by the pool, me and Nua and Penny go in, but Ava does not. She has a swimsuit on and a wrap on over it and she sits on one of the pool chairs and looks at her phone, but finally when Penny yells at her enough times she puts it down and shakes her head. “I have stuff to do, Penny.”

“You always have stuff to do,” he says, going over to the edge of the pool close to her. “Do it later.”

She smiles, and he splashes water out of the pool at her. “It’s your birthday.”

She rolls her eyes, and then stands and takes off her wrap. She throws it on the chair and her phone on top of it, and jumps into the pool.

“It’s him and Keol,” says Nua to me, rubbing his arms before they go cold, as we watch them with their pool noodles in the deep end. “They’re the only ones that can talk to her like that.”

“Can talk to her like that and have it work,” I mutter. “She’d just get annoyed at us.”

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Nua laughs, and I smile too. I miss Keol. I do not miss Miss Lilly, and it seems her children do not either, because they are laughing. They are finally together again, without her, and they are laughing.

Bayan calls us for lunch a little while after Ava finally comes into the pool, and as I pull myself out dripping wet she comes over to me and crouches down in front of me with a towel. “You moved it.”

“Huh?” I say, wiping at my face, and she grabs my left hand. My wedding ring is on my first finger instead of my third, I don’t even remember really when I moved it but it’s been there for a while, I have worn it this whole time that I lived here and that we were in Shan and that we came back, but now it is just on a different finger. “Oh, yeah.”

“Why?” she asks, running her hand over my head to get the water out of my hair, and I shrug. “Dunno. Why not?”

She shrugs too, and we stand. I wipe the water off more as we go back inside, and the first thing that Ava says when we go into the dining room is, “Are you sitting on the good chairs in your bathing suit?”

“Lighten up,” says Penny lazily. “It’s my birthday.”

“Mine too,” she says, and throws a towel over her chair before sitting down. Bayan comes in from the kitchen with some sandwiches, and to my surprise Nua takes my chair. I look at him, and he grins and nods to his own, the one at Ava’s left hand. After a moment I take it. Penny’s at her right hand and Bayan sits next to him, and after a moment Taymer comes out with a bowl of cut up fruit and sits next to him too. I do not know where Abigala is, I haven’t seen her all day, I actually haven’t seen her in a while since Ava put her on house arrest, and to be honest at this moment I do not really care, because Ava is laughing, and there is no smoke coming out of her mouth with it. Bayan is here, he is not saying much but he is here with us at the table, and Nua wants me to sit close to Ava so I can see her laugh.

We spend some time together in the afternoon too, but after birthday dinner and cake Ava insists on getting some work done. Penny protests, but Ava reminds him that he told her to just do it later and now it’s later, and he grumbles but puts on another episode of his favorite drama show. Bayan is sitting with us, I’m sure there’s a pile of dishes in the sink but they can sit there overnight, he has his head on Penny’s shoulder and his eyes closed and Penny’s pinky finger is curling around his gently.

But when the episode is over and the TV goes silent I can hear Ava’s voice in the room next door. The clock on the wall says it’s almost ten-thirty at night, but she seems to be on the phone with someone, and Nua glances at me. He hears it too. She is always on the phone nowadays.

We leave Penny and Bayan there. I think they have been sleeping in his mother’s bedroom, which is only accessible through the office that Ava has been working in lately. I wonder if they’re gonna cut a hole into the hallway. Nua knocks on the office door and then pushes it open, and Ava glances over at him, sees me too, and smiles. She says something into her phone, and hangs up, and sighs. She runs her fingers through her hair, and says, “Hey.”

“How was your birthday?” asks Nua softly, and she smiles. “Sit.”

She starts to organize the papers on her desk as we take the two chairs across from her, and she doesn’t look up when Nua says, “Ava.”

“Mm?”

“Relax for a second. Please.”

“I can’t,” she mutters, “I have to get all of this sorted out to start the monitoring and the check-ups-”

“Ava,” says Nua again, leaning forward. “Look at us. You can’t read.”

“I can read some,” she says defensively, looking up, and she stares at Nua for a moment before exhaling sharply and sitting down slowly in her mother’s desk chair. “I don’t know, okay?”

I blink, and Nua furrows his eyebrows. “Know what?”

“Who I would pick.”

Her eyes flicker between me and Nua, and he looks at me for a moment. “As your prominent?”

“I know you want to know,” she says softly. “And I can’t pick. And I don’t want to.”

“Ava,” I say softly. Nua swallows, leaning back, and she shakes her head, looking away. “We’re not doing that anymore. I don’t want to choose between you which one I have to love more, or hurt more. We’re doing...something new, together, all of us. I know that it was Keol before. And before him it was Owen. But I don’t want to do that to you again.”

Nua’s smiling slightly, and I take his hand. She throws down the papers in her hand, sighing, and says, “And I think that we should annul.”

“Ava,” says Nua, his fingers squeezing mine, and she shakes her head. “Just think about it.”

“We have,” says Nua. “You have other things to worry about right now.”

“Yeah,” she mutters, leaning back and rubbing her eyes. “Everything. Everything in the world. Your sister wants to kill me, Aber, but you know I have to keep her here, I don’t need her going out and telling everyone about Sloan, and I have no idea what to do about Taymer-”

“Hey,” I say. “Take a breath.”

She exhales out, and looks at me.

“I can handle Abigala,” I say softly. She smiles a little. “Is she mad at you?”

“She doesn’t want to talk much,” I say after a moment. “I guess we, um, already got over our whole needing-to-see-each-other-again thing.”

“And Bayan and Penny, they’re talking to Taymer,” says Nua as Ava smiles a little again, when I do, and she nods, rubbing her eyes. “I need to find his brother.”

“And my parents,” I say, and she nods. “And I need to get people to look into the way my mother ran the agencies.”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been working on?” asks Nua, and she nods. “I’m trying to find people I can trust.”

“How’s it going?”

“I’ve got a few.”

“So you’re doing good, then,” says Nua, and she looks at him. He smiles a bit. “You’re making progress.”

She sighs again, but smiles a bit too. “It’s a start.”

“You’ve been in this job for three weeks,” I say, and she leans her head back in the chair, and sighs. “Yeah.”

“Come to bed,” says Nua softly. “It’s late.”

She looks at her watch, and stifles a yawn, and Nua stands up. I stand up too, because he still has my hand, and after a moment Ava rises to her feet too. She turns the lights off in the office as we go, and closes the door behind her, and we go to bed.