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Yes, Lyrica had tried to thank her, but Angel had been so upset that day, because Chaya had refused to allow Bliss to go to the marina with the other girls when Angel had come to tell them good-bye, that she’d been unable to process the gratitude Lyrica had shown.
“No thanks were needed.” She cleared her throat, looking up. “If we’d known Zoey was in trouble, we would have been here.” She focused on the other sister where she stood next to the work island. “We didn’t hear about it until it was too late to get here in time to help.”
“But you came the minute you heard,” Zoey pointed out. “I think Graham said the three of you dropped a job to hurry back. But you’d been here a few weeks before leaving for that job, hadn’t you?”
“A few times,” she agreed. For five years she’d been there as often as possible.
“Come on, drink your coffee before it gets cold. Breakfast is nearly ready and then it’s going to be like feeding time at the zoo.” Zoey laughed.
Angel listened to them debate over which of the men could eat the most before the conversation shifted and flowed again. They drew her in without interrogating her, let her listen and draw every piece of information they gave her into her hungry soul.
They called Chaya the keeper of Natches’s sanity. He could drive even the steadiest person to the brink of murder if she wasn’t there to pull him back. The older he got, the worse he got, they claimed.
Zoey laughed and recounted the fact that she’d been the only one of them to force him to pull back. Lyrica glared at her sister and recounted how Natches had not just hit Graham in the face, but nearly caused her to move from Kentucky entirely.
Eve and Piper, the two oldest sisters, laughed and claimed Dawg as their tormentor during the beginning days of their relationships with their husbands. And through all the upheavals and arguments with the two men, it had always been Chaya that watched their backs and they hadn’t known it until recently.
Rowdy was the keeper of their secrets, though. They could go to him, and though he couldn’t do anything to pull his male cousins back from whatever schemes they had regarding the girls, he’d always had advice and, in Zoey’s case, had actually kept a secret that nearly caused him and Dawg to come to blows.
The Mackay men were as complicated and ever-changing as their wives, it seemed. But they were dedicated to family, to protecting the girls as well as each other.
“I remember when Chaya showed up that summer,” Christa said softly as the last of the warmers was filled. She looked over at Angel, her gaze somber with whatever memories filled her. “Dawg told me about this agent they were working with.” She almost grinned. “Called her plain. She smoked too much, cursed too often, and she was making Natches erratic. The truth was, Natches was terrifying Dawg because he’d gone so quiet, refusing to discuss whatever torment he was experiencing.”
Shock shook Angel. Chaya smoked? Cursed? The mother she’d known had never done either thing.
“She wore frumpy clothes, Dawg claimed, and whatever her problem was, she was going to piss him off. But he was already pissed. And worried. Something about her just set him off, he said.” Christa shook her head and leaned against the counter, silent for a moment before continuing. “The next summer she was back, searching for the person or persons behind the theft of the missiles they’d been investigating the year before. Following up.” She grinned. “Dawg would sneer the word and go off on her ‘follow-up’ like it was some kind of immoral act. Because he knew something about her was killing Natches, and he couldn’t figure out what.” The look she gave Angel was compassionate, understanding. “Then Natches told him how he and Chaya had come together four years before in Iraq and how she’d lost her daughter, and he warned Dawg their relationship hinged on his acceptance of the woman he loved because now they were having a child together. That’s when Dawg realized how far he’d been pushing because he didn’t know what was wrong or how to fix things for Natches. That’s how they are, Angel. All of them, including Chaya. They’ll tear themselves apart trying to make sense of things. And Chaya was so torn over you. She sensed more than you would tell anyone. She sensed the deceptions, and your hunger to know her and Bliss, and she couldn’t make it fit, couldn’t force it to make sense. But all of us saw the conflict inside her. That need to let you close, to let you be a part of her life versus far too many years of hard lessons and the destruction she’d already survived when she’d believed you died in that hotel.”
Everyone believed so deeply in Chaya. Duke, the entire Mackay family. Everyone believed and she wanted to hold on to that so desperately that it was a hunger inside her.
But she couldn’t discount what she remembered. She couldn’t put aside that damned phone call where her father had raged at Chaya to come for her and argued with her when she refused to do so.
She didn’t say anything, she couldn’t. Pushing back the pain, the anger, the sheer fury that she couldn’t make herself accept a different version of the past, she finished her coffee and turned her gaze to Zoey.
“Thank you for the coffee,” she said softly. “If you’ll excuse me, there’s things I need to do now.”
Like run away. Escape these women with their certainty that Chaya would never turn her back on her child. Their belief that Angel had to be wrong. And she didn’t want to disabuse them of their belief in her mother, she realized. She didn’t want them to think harshly of her or Chaya. This was the family Chaya relied on, had lived within for so many years. Their opinion of her, their love for her, mattered to her.
Angel wouldn’t threaten it.
She hadn’t come there to threaten her mother’s life; she’d only wanted to be a part of it. As Angel Calloway, not as Beth Dane, the child she’d lost. She could have survived being on the periphery of her mother’s and sister’s lives, being a friend that came when needed. She couldn’t handle being the child Chaya had lost, though.
She couldn’t handle the fact that everyone had a far different memory or opinion of that time when Angel had been Beth and she’d listened to her father raging at her mother on the phone.
Because neither of them had wanted her. He’d had her brought to Iraq as leverage against Chaya when he’d learned she was close to identifying him as the spy in Army Intelligence that was selling troop movements to the enemy. But her mother hadn’t wanted to come for her, because of her lover, Natches Mackay.
Fine, she’d been in a hospital rather than in a bed with Natches. But she didn’t come and she didn’t send anyone to collect her daughter, for whatever reason.
If she’d shown up, if she had just come for her daughter, then Jenny wouldn’t have died. Jenny wouldn’t have died and Beth wouldn’t have had to become Angel and all their lives could have been different.
But none of that had happened.
Now she had to figure out how to ensure Bliss’s safety. The fact that everyone knew who she was, and that everyone felt the need to assure her that her mother had never turned away from her wasn’t why she was here.
Besides, if that were true, then Jenny wouldn’t be dead, Beth wouldn’t be Angel, and she wouldn’t be sneaking from the house by climbing through the open crossbeams that served as the patio’s roof, praying she found someone dumb enough to be where they shouldn’t be so she’d have an excuse to expend the rage and the pain.
“That leg is never going to heal if you don’t stop overexerting it.” Chaya stepped around the corner of the enclosed patio, her tone thoughtful as Angel sent her a disgruntled look.
What was with these damned Mackays anyway? They just couldn’t seem to leave well enough alone.
