I do not know exactly what my parents talked to Abigala about, but it was a relatively short conversation given the subject matter. Afterwards Abigala went up to her room, my room, mine and Nua’s, and she locked the doors behind her. The doors were never able to lock when I lived in there, but now the door to the hallway and the door to the bathroom can, and she locks herself in her room, my room, mine and Nua’s. She puts herself on house arrest, bedroom arrest, she does not want to talk to my parents or me or Ava, especially not Ava, not after she has told all of us, finally, what happened.

Nua and I go to the library a few days later, he’s done with all the books he’s lugged into the bedroom and he goes wandering along the shelves as I curl up on one of the chairs. He comes back after a little while, and puts a stack of books down on the table between them as he takes the other. “Hey.”

“You already read that one,” I say absentmindedly, and he laughs, picking the top one off his stack and looking at it. “Yeah, but it was one of my favorites.”

“Mm,” I say, and he reaches over and whacks me on the arm with the book. “Hey.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking over at him, and he grins a little. “That was a big fight.”

“Was it?” I say. “I left halfway through, I don’t know what they talked about.”

“Yeah, you do.”

I scoff, and sigh, and shake my head. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how she hadn’t told them anything yet and I don’t know how she thought she was just gonna get away with not telling them.”

“She was just putting it off,” says Nua.

I sigh again, and lean my head back against the back of the chair. “I’m mad at myself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you wanted to get back to her,” says Nua softly. “I wanted you to get back to her too. I thought it was so good that you had someone out there who you loved so much and I wanted it to work out for you.”

“I don’t not love her,” I say softly. “I just don’t know if I can forgive her.”

“Well,” says Nua, “right now, you don’t have to.”

I glance at him.

“She hasn’t apologized,” says Nua, “she hasn’t done anything to help make it right. I know you want to stand with her because she’s your sister but you couldn’t have known that all this was gonna happen and you don’t have to support her just because she’s your sister.”

“I don’t have to support Ava just because she’s my wife,” I mutter, and Nua laughs. “No, but you don’t. You support her because she’s right.”

“Do you like what she’s doing?” I ask him, and he shrugs. “I don’t really know what she’s doing. But I assume it’s better than Lilly, and Lilly’s the reason I was living on the run since I was a kid.”

“Streets?” I ask, and he smiles slightly. “Sometimes.”

There’s a knock at the door, and I look over the back of my chair to see Dad pushing the door open. He grins at Nua, and then jerks his head at me. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

I glance at Nua, and he smiles, picking up a book.

So my dad and I go for a walk. My dad wants to go down to the beach, because he hasn’t been to a beach in a long time, he tells me, but he doesn’t want to go into the water. We take Nano, too, and she goes running down the sand. I’m pretty sure she won’t run away but I still keep an eye on her. We just kick our shoes off and go towards the jetty, the rocks that go down into the ocean. I sit on one, watching my dad try to balance, and he looks at me as the breeze brushes against us. “Are you okay?”

“I guess,” I say, leaning my head on my hand. “I guess, I just, what did you talk about?”

And he sighs, jumping off the rocks, and brushes some sand off his hands. I stand up to follow him, and he goes down the beach, towards the water. “She told us about Lilly. And what Lilly had told her. Abigala knew that Lilly had a daughter, and that the daughter was married, but not that she was married to you.”

“I know,” I whisper. Nano comes running back towards us, barking at a seagull, but when it flies away she skids to a stop in front of me, her tail wagging furiously.

“And Lilly told Abigala that she needed help both in reforming the agencies system, and reforming their public image. That’s why she wanted to mold Abigala into a representation of the way it could all work out perfectly.”

“And she fell for it?”

“Abigala met Lilly years ago,” says Dad softly, and the breeze picks up his voice and carries it away. He sighs, and shakes his head, and then says, “I mean, at first it was just coincidence and because Abigala was going to the same places Lilly was, they were both interested in the same events, well, for different reasons. But when she mentioned that she had a twin brother Lilly got really interested.”

“That’s what Ava said,” I murmur. “She said her mother had been planning it for years.”

“I don’t know,” says Dad with a shrug, “because your sister never told us she had met Lilly LeGatte. Why, I don’t know.”

“You would have told her it was too dangerous and she couldn’t keep working.”

“Maybe,” says Dad with a slight smile. “But she had a secret, and Lilly knew it was a secret, and she told her that she was going to make her life better, and all of our lives better.”

“She arrested you.”

“I don’t think Abi knew about that part until it happened,” says Dad with a laugh. “There was a lot she seemed confused on. You must have been confused, too.”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “I just, I didn’t know how it all ended up like this but it wasn’t just a coincidence.”

“No,” agrees Dad. “But Lilly got her claws in, and she told Abigala she should get married.”

“Four times.”

“Yes,” says Dad with a sigh, looking down to the sea. We stop, the sand under our feet is getting wet and cold. Nano sits, panting, and I crouch down to rub her head behind the ears like she likes. “Ava said that Abi traded me, to take her place. Ava’s place.”

Dad raises his eyebrows, and then shrugs. “One way of putting it. You know, a lot of it, I don’t blame Abi for. She’s young, and she wanted to be active in this world and she didn’t want to get us in trouble, she wanted to help us, and she, she fell for a scam. She got manipulated.”

“What about the kids?”

And Dad sighs, looking down at his toes, and then he turns to me. “That part…”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I’m stuck on that part, too.”

Stolen story; please report.

“She won’t tell us anything about her husbands,” says my dad, “which means one of two things. Either they were forced to marry her, or they’re underage and they were forced to marry her.”

“And the kids,” I say softly. “Even if the boys aren’t underage she still could have forced them to…”

“Yeah,” says Dad softly. He reaches down and puts his hand on my shoulder, and says, “Is that what happened to you?”

And I smile, finally, and then I laugh, and rub my eyes as I stand up. “No.”

I look at him, but he doesn’t say anything, and I sigh. “No, she did this weird thing, that I didn’t expect her to do.”

“What thing?”

“She was nice to me,” I say, and Dad smiles a little too. “I mean, I had to get to know her, a little bit, and Keol, her prominent, and…”

I trail off, because it’s awkward, I don’t want to tell my dad what happened that day and that night, and even some of what happened after, and he just looks at me, the wind pushing against us. I smile again, and say, “It’s okay, Dad.”

“Do you love her?” he asks me, and I press my lips together, and he smiles a bit. “It kind of seems like you love her.”

“She took care of me,” I say softly. “And she got us out, she got us away.”

“She brought you to live underground in a secret tent world.”

“It was either that or stay with Miss Lilly,” I say, and Dad laughs. “Yeah. The wife or the mother-in-law, I get that.”

“Dad, she got you out of jail.”

“I know,” he answers, “and we’re not letting her hold that over our heads forever.”

I laugh. “She won’t.”

“Your mom and I always thought about it,” he says after a moment, starting to walk again, and I follow. So does Nano. “As you got older, what to say if you ever asked us, you know, about marriage, or girls.”

“Dad,” I say with a laugh, and he shrugs. “I mean, it happens.”

“You hardly let me out of the house, how was it supposed to happen?”

“Oh, please,” says Dad, nudging me with his elbow. “I mean, Aber, with everything we’ve seen, what do you think we would say if you ever came home and said you liked a girl?”

I smile a little, scratching my head, and sigh. “I don’t know. You’d vet her.”

“Yes, we would,” says Dad with a laugh. “And if you ever came home and told us you wanted to marry Ava LeGatte the vet would immediately yield a no.”

“Well, I didn’t want to marry her,” I say, kicking a rock in our path. “She didn’t want to marry me, either. Or Nua. Or Keol.”

Dad looks at me, and I sigh. “I mean, with Lilly as a mother, she had no choice. What about Lilly as a boss?”

Dad smiles slightly, and puts his hand on my shoulder again before letting it fall. “I know. We talked about that too. Maybe Abi didn’t have a choice in the marriages. But she did have a choice in what she did to her husbands. Lilly couldn’t have forced that.”

“Lilly was a rapist,” I say softly. “She, she, I know she did things to Keol, and he had to go down and sit at the dinner table with her every night. And Owen, that’s why he killed himself, and, god, she made Bayan sleep in bed with her, and she hit him a couple times and god knows what else, and he got up every morning and just kept doing the housework.”

“Did she ever do anything to you?” asks Dad, and I shake my head. “No. Not like that. Just words. I don’t think she did anything to Nua, either, because Ava…for the first few years Nua was here Ava didn’t pay attention to him. She would’ve cared, if Lilly hurt him, but Lilly was focused on Keol, and Bayan, because she knew that Ava loved them more.”

“Bayan’s been here, what, fifteen years, he said?” says Dad, and I nod. “Yeah. He’s five years older than them, he was only eleven.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Dad softly. “And that’s all he’s done, for the past fourteen years? Do the housework?”

“His job is Ava,” I say with a slight smile. “It was the twins, but then when Penny went away it was Ava. So he did what Lilly said but he also got Ava out of the hospital and he’s been helping Ava, a little bit, with her work, at least driving her and stuff.”

“Why can’t she drive herself?”

“Bayan won’t teach us.”

“Really,” says my dad through a laugh, and I smile too. “Yeah, I don’t know why, but he drives her to work and he used to drive Lilly around, too, and he cooks and cleans and…keeps the house pretty.”

“Mm.”

“Ava’s told him he doesn’t have to keep doing it,” I say, and Dad shakes his head. “Something like that…it gets to be a habit. And when the habit is taking care of someone you care about it’s really hard to break.”

“Ava cares about him,” I say softly. “She wanted to get him out of the house, too, and we did. But then we all came back.”

“Yeah,” says my dad musingly. We’ve turned a little bit, and are now heading back up to the house. “And you came back for Abigala.”

I take a big sigh, and my dad smiles, and looks up to the sky as we go. “Ava and your mom are discussing what to do. I don’t think we knew how serious it was until last night, though.”

“So you get how complicated it’s been,” I say, and Dad laughs, stopping in the sand again. Nano goes running again, she has been trotting behind us flinging up sand from her paws but she sees something over there now and goes to investigate. Dad reaches out and puts his hands on my shoulders, and then he draws me in close to him and hugs me. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I whisper, hugging him back, and he smiles, and holds me at arm’s length. “I don’t know how difficult it must have been for you, this past year, having to be married and trying to find out what happened and then realizing everything was so upside down.”

“When I was underground,” I say, and my dad laughs, taking his hands back to rub at his face. “Oh, god, I won’t ever be used to that.”

I smile too. “Two of the Shan people, Alis and Haywood, they were both married to Nova, but she was in love with Sigrid, those are all the Shan people.”

Dad raises his eyebrows, connecting all of that in his head, and then nods.

“And Alis and Haywood realized that they didn’t, they weren’t in love with Nova, but they still cared about her, and so that’s why they all ran away.”

“Makes sense,” says Dad. “Kinda.”

“Haywood was really good to talk to,” I say quietly. The breeze picks up again, and I shiver. “He reminded me of you.”

Dad smiles.

“And I figured, it would’ve been good for Bayan, maybe, to talk to him, but I think it was too soon and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Do you want me to talk to Bayan?” asks Dad with a grin, and I shrug. “Yeah. If he wants. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“See, this is just so Aberworth of you,” says Dad. “I’m trying to talk to you about how you’re feeling, and you’re worrying about Bayan.”

“I’m worrying about everyone,” I say. “All the time.”

Dad laughs again at that, and bumps my arm so we’ll start walking again. “Oh, I know. You always had a lot of anxiety about everything and everyone.”

“Can you blame me?”

“No,” says Dad. “But for right now, Aber, I want to know you’re okay.”

“I am.”

“Okay,” says Dad, side-eyeing me, sounding as though he does not believe me. “Listen. I give you permission.”

“To what?”

“To not care,” says Dad. “I know you’re worried about Bayan and Penny and Ava and Abigala and us. And yourself. But right now, your mom and I are fine. I’ll talk to Bayan and Penny. Your mom and Ava will figure out what to do with Abigala, and you know your mom will help with everything Ava’s been stressing about too just by being there. So you can relax. You don’t have to worry about us.”

I sigh. “I guess.”

“Do I need to be worried about you?” asks Dad, as we approach the front of the house again. Nano comes us to join us, running in between me and him, she almost trips me as she darts around us. There’s a little pathway that goes around to the side door, and the stones against my feet are cold after the sun-warmed sand. “I know you’ve said over and over that you’re okay and that you’re okay with Ava.”

“I am,” I say again, as we stop outside the door. “I am, I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t do, I would tell you if I wasn’t. I am. I love her.”

“You love her?” says Dad, turning back to look at me, and I flush, I didn’t mean to say that, but then Dad smiles at me, and he says, “Really?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Have you told her that before?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Underground.”

Dad laughs. “Right. And how did you feel when you said that?”

“How did I feel?” I ask. “I don’t know, she said it first, and it felt, it felt good, and I wasn’t sure, but I said it later, and she smiled, and that…was good.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Dad. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I say, and he smiles again, and opens the door to let us back inside. Nano shakes, we should have wiped her feet off before we came in, now Bayan will have to clean the entire kitchen and he won’t complain one word about it. “Yeah, okay. I think I believe you now.”

“Finally.”

“Hey,” says Dad, catching my arm. I stop, turning back to him, and he smiles. “Don’t worry.”