Ava is right, of course she’s right. Abigala is not cooperating with us and her husbands are in danger and we cannot excuse her just because she is part of my family, this family. But I am right, too. The summer is waning, and as the heat goes Abigala’s stubbornness comes in full swing. My parents always called us stubborn, the both of us, and sometimes I felt like it wasn’t fair to me because Abigala was always much more stubborn than I was. She is showing it now. She is in a minimum-security jail, not even a prison, not even bars, it is a decent place to be, I think, but she is angry about it, because she wants to be home, with me, and with our parents, even if Ava has to be there too. But Ava is the one who has to go in to talk to her, occasionally my parents but usually Ava, and Abigala does not want to talk to her. A few weeks after Abigala goes away Ava comes home and announces that Abigala did not even come to the meeting with her; the guards at the jail said that she simply refused and they could not force her to respond to a meeting summons.

My dad rolls his eyes when she says this. He and Mom went to visit her the week before, and she came to that meeting, but she was quiet and sullen throughout it and hardly talked to them. This is what they tell me, anyway; I have not been going in to see her. I have not seen her in weeks now, and I have stopped wanting to. I stay home with Nua and Penny and Bayan and Nano, and we go to the library and out to the pool and sometimes we go into town, on the train. We visit the big library again, and Penny points out what building he was standing on top of to throw pink paint all over me and Nua. Then he says he wasn’t personally in charge of the pink paint, but he was there, and then we spend some time in the library. The newspapers are up to date now; a few of them talk about the death of Lilly LeGatte and her daughter taking over her work. Abigala is mentioned in a few of them as well, her arrest, and Nua and I even find our names in one. Penny is not mentioned in any.

Taymer leaves us after a few weeks. Alicia and her sister Bellie have been looking for safe houses outside of the city, and they have helped fix one up so that it is ready to both take care of the boys they have and to take new ones. Ava did budgeting before, she’s trying to figure out how she can start allotting more money for the better houses, she calls it a sanction against the ones that abuse the system and I don’t know what that means but it seems my parents do, because my mom is working very closely with her. They are starting to get along better, now, Ava tells me my mother was a little bit icy at first but she has begun to warm up. For my mom, that means being more quick to criticize and lend advice even when someone doesn’t ask. But that’s good, it must be, that my mom and Ava can work together, because like Lilly said, they both have a perspective, and the two of them know more than just one of them would alone.

So Taymer goes to a house an hour or so away, to be taken care of by Alicia’s sister Bellie and the people that Ava and Alicia and Bellie trust. Ava has still not found his brother Caleb yet, but when they do, she tells me, they will send him to go stay with his brother. All of this she tells me at nights, usually Nua is there too but a lot of the times he is sleeping already when she comes back, and she comes to bed and I ask her what she did that day and she laughs and she tells me and then she asks me what I did, and I say, “Nothing.”

Nua’s birthday comes in August. He is twenty-two now, and Ava helps Bayan make a cake for him. Penny says that Bayan must have done most of it, and Ava whacks him on the arm, and Bayan smiles, but does not say anything. He has not said much, recently, not even to Penny, and I want to ask my dad if he has tried to talk to him, but Bayan said it would be good, but only soon. I don’t want to rush him. I don’t want to rush Ava, or Abigala, either, so I just sit and I wait. There is not much else I can do. I help Penny take care of Nano, Chloe’s gone back down to Shan with Sloan and Shiv the cat is very calm and follows Ava around when she’s home, and Penny and I take Nano running on the beach almost every day. She likes to swim, she always goes bounding into the water and barking at the waves. Penny tries to drop her in the pool once as an experiment and she paddles around in there for a few seconds and then hops out and shakes herself off, spraying us with water. “I think she likes the salt,” I tell him, “she wants to drink the ocean water and she doesn’t like the chlorine.” Penny laughs and crouches down for her, and she licks his face a little and then she leads us around the house to the beach.

But Ava and my mother do seem to be getting along, until one day in the early fall when they come down to lunch in a stony silence. We haven’t been having every lunch together anymore, usually we just wander down to the kitchen whenever we feel hungry so that Bayan only has to make one meal a day. He makes Ava and Penny breakfast sometimes, even though they’ve told him he doesn’t have to, but he knows how to do it perfect and it’s just a habit for him and he doesn’t seem to want to stop. And he still makes dinner almost every day, even though they’ve told him he doesn’t have to, but he’s the best cook in the house and has nothing else to do all day, so he cooks and sometimes he cleans and then he spends a lot of time sitting with Penny. A lot of times they don’t talk, they just sit, sometimes watching something on TV and sometimes not, just sitting.

It’s the first day of fall, at least the first day where the temperature is cool and Nua goes rummaging through Ava’s big closet for sweaters, that Ava and my mother come down to the kitchen while I am in there with Bayan and Nua and Penny, looking for something to make for lunch. I am pulling ingredients out of the fridge for an omelet when Ava comes in, dropping her bag on the floor, and she goes right to the sink. She pulls a glass down from the cabinet and fills it with water, and then my parents come in behind her, my mom saying, “I don’t think this is the best way to handle it.”

She stops, though, when she sees the rest of us, and Ava takes a long drink of her water, and says, “Thank you, Ane, but I’m not really looking for suggestions at the moment.”

“I thought we were working on this together,” says Mom, her voice is patient but I can tell she’s slightly frustrated and I wonder how long they’ve been arguing. Ava shakes her head. “We are, yes, but I’m still in charge.”

“Ava, dear-”

“Don’t call me that.” Ava slams the glass down on the counter, and my mother looks at her. She sighs, and then leaves.

God, I guess we do all like to walk away from conflict. My father looks at me, but it’s Nua who answers. “Her mother used to call her that.”

Penny looks at him. We are quiet for a minute, I don’t know what to say or do, and then Bayan gives a sigh. “Keol.”

I look at Nua, my stomach dropping, and he makes a slight noise in understanding. It has been one year, now, hasn’t it, one year gone since the last time she came home and kissed him on the forehead. No one moves for a moment, and then I go after her.

I find her standing in her mother’s office, her arms crossed as she looks over the backyard, and I knock gently on the door. “Ava.”

“I yelled at your mother,” she says, turning to me, and then sinks into her chair. “Oh, god, Aber, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say gently, sitting across from her.

“God,” she says again, burying her face in her hands. “I’m such a mess, I’m sorry”

“It’s okay,” I say again. “We know it’s…it’s been a year, since we lost Keol, you’re allowed to be sad.”

She doesn’t look up, but I hear her exhale, and then she lowers her hands so her fingers are on her nose, but she can see me. I shrug. “Bayan.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Oh, he’s too smart,” she says under her breath. I smile slightly. She looks up at the ceiling and says bitterly, “Shouldn’t be upset, shouldn’t be, he’d be twenty-five by now and my mother would decide he’s not worth the trouble, he’d be gone anyway.”

The silence hangs heavy between us, and finally I say, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

She sighs, wiping her mouth, and turns away. “Never mind. I have work to do.”

“No, no,” I say. “You don’t get to do that anymore.”

“Do what?” she says, looking at me, and I shrug. “Push us away because you don’t wanna talk about it. As if...as if we’re not a part of this.”

She leans her head on her hand, and then sighs. “You are. I know that. But…”

“You loved him,” I say gently. “You pretended like you didn’t, but you did. And you loved Owen, too.”

She smiles slightly, but she doesn’t look happy. Tears well in her eyes. “I should have all of you.”

I don’t say anything.

“I shouldn’t have any of you, but I did, and now I should have all of you, but I don’t.

“And he didn’t have to die,” she says quietly after a moment. “My mother just...let him. So that I wouldn’t, but then I did, so it didn’t even work out for her anyway. And Owen.”

She rubs her lips together, and then says, “He did it to himself, but he did it because of her.”

I take a deep breath. “You can’t change any of that now, Ava. It’s not your fault.”

“His last name was Mercer,” she says quietly, and then spins her computer screen to me. She has multiple articles open, all pertaining to a woman named Melany Mercer. “That’s his mother. Owen’s.”

“That’s his…”

“She used to work for my mother,” says Ava quietly. “That’s how Penny and I knew him. But she moved on and left him here. I don’t even know if she knows that her son is dead.”

“He would be twenty-three,” I say softly, after a moment. She sniffles, and looks away, leaning her head on her hand. “Keol would be twenty-five. You’re twenty-one. Ava, my mom is fifty. She’s been doing this for as long as you’ve been alive.”

Ava scoffs, but she smiles a little, and looks back at me.

“I know you’re the one with the position, and the money, and you get to give the final order, but you gotta let her help you with this.”

“I know,” she murmurs. “I know. I just, I don’t know how to break through it, you know, I have my people who are advising me, and your mom’s one of them, but my mother had all of her people, and I just can’t, I can’t get through to them, I can’t convince them.”

“Wasn’t there a time when you believed your mother?” I ask, and she glances at me. “What?”

“When you were a child. When you still trusted her. You must’ve believed what she told you. Which is okay, because like you said, she brainwashed you, manipulated you, you didn’t know any better. But now you do.”

She just looks at me, from across her desk, and I smile slightly just looking at her. “And you, Miss Ava, are one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met, so if you can change your own mind, you can change theirs.”

She gives me a short laugh, leaning her forehead on her hand, and sighs. “I just…”

“Use us,” I say. She looks up at me. “Excuse me?”

“We’re your family,” I say, reaching my hand across the desk. “You’re stuck with us now, and we wanna help.”

She smiles, a tear trickling down her cheek, and takes my hand. We’re quiet for a moment, her fingers twist around mine, she has Keol’s ring around her thumb and it rubs against mine.

“Tell your mother I’m sorry,” she says after a moment, and I laugh. “Shouldn’t you tell her?”

“Yes,” says Ava, “but I don’t want to, is she mad at me?”

“I think she knows you have a lot going on.”

“There’s more,” says Ava softly, and then she lets go of my hand and pulls her computer back to her. She turns the screen so I can’t see and starts to type something, and I say, “More what?”

“More going on,” answers Ava after a moment, she is reading something, and then she takes a deep breath and looks at me. “Yeah. Um. I haven’t even, I haven’t even told your mom this yet, but.”

“What is it?” I say when she stops, and she takes a breath, and says, “Do you want to meet Abigala’s kids?”

My eyes widen, and then I lean back in my chair. “Really?”

“I’ve been keeping track of them,” says Ava softly. “They, um, they’re not ready to come home yet, I know we were talking about renovating the house and we still have some time for that, but since they’re so close in age we can, we can maybe visit them, every so often, starting pretty soon. Like, in the next month or two, maybe.”

“Are you in contact with someone about this?” I ask, and she shrugs. “They needed someone to take over after Abigala went away, and since she won’t tell us where her husbands are…”

“What about my mom?” I ask, slightly surprised, and Ava smiles a little. “Well, she’s still in the middle of the whole having-been-arrested thing, so they came to me. I don’t think she knows. But they emailed me, yesterday, about maybe, we could go in to meet them soon. All of us, if we want.”

“Yeah,” I say softly, and then I swallow. “No, yeah, I think that would, we should do that.”

“Have you ever held a baby before?” asks Ava, looking up at me, and I smile a little, and shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It’s,” says Ava, and then she smiles too, and says, “It’s nice.”

“I’m sure,” I say with a slight laugh, and then I laugh again, and I say, “Oh, god, the babies.”

“The babies,” agrees Ava. “Still no word on the husbands, but when we do find them they’ll have rights to their kids too, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to, like…”

“Keep them,” I say quietly, and Ava nods. “We’ll have to see. I think we should make room here, still, because they might not want them. But if they do, we can work out a custody thing, between them and your parents, because your parents have rights too, and then, then, when Abigala comes home.”

“When,” I say softly, and Ava hears, and she nods. “Yes. When.”

“When?” I ask, and Ava smiles a little, and sighs. “That, I don’t know. I guess that’s up to Abigala.”

I bite my thumbnail. Ava looks at me. “Don’t do that.”

I smile, and she reaches out for my hand again. I give it to her, and she looks at my thumb. “We can, we can tell your parents about that, then, if you think it’s a good idea.”

“Yeah,” I say softly. “I think they’d want to know.”

“Yeah,” murmurs Ava in agreement. “Okay. Um. I do, actually, have a lot of work to do, though.”

“Right,” I say with a grin, standing, and she holds onto my hand for a second before letting go. She looks up at me, and I lean my hands on the desk. “I’ll bring you up something for lunch.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Bayan will make it, I’ll just bring it up.”

Ava smiles too, rolling her eyes, and mutters, “Stupid boys.”

“Hey,” I say. She shakes her head, and I smile, and I go to the door. Before I leave, though, she says softly, “I love you.”

I stop, my hand on the knob, and I look back at her. She picks at her fingers, so she doesn’t have to look at me, but after a moment she does, when I don’t say anything, and finally I just say softly, “Love you too.”

And Ava smiles.