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Her sisters had their own lives.
So did she.
Blessed Reunions was Sydney’s life now. Her purpose.
The small investigation agency specialized in one thing—finding lost loved ones. No matter their age or the circumstances of their disappearances, Blessed Reunions helped find the lost.
Sydney was making it her life mission to see to it that other people didn’t hurt the way her own family had. Or the way her best friends had.Jo-Jo had lost her family in a car accident and been cruelly separated from the grandmother who had adored her. Grace’s mother had abducted her and her sisters and hidden them for almost fifteen years. Pen had been dumped off outside a hospital in Dallas and had been separated from her sister Zoey off and on for eleven years, until Zoey had gotten guardianship.
They had all been hurt so much.
Family was what mattered most. That was a lesson Sydney had learned, fast. Her best friends, too.
She looked at the youngest of those best friends now. And fought the worry. Penelope was sucking down antacids again. And was that Pepto in her bag?
Pen—chronically underweight, anyway—had lost weight, too. Sydney suspected she’d been having trouble sleeping.
Pen was angsting again.
Since Zoey had almost died a year ago, Pen’s anxiety had gotten significantly worse. Pen had a lot of little quirks, as she liked to call them, that at first meeting had made Sydney suspect Pen was somewhere on the autism spectrum. Sydney had two sisters with autism—she recognized the signs.
Pen didn’t have a lot of the same social issues that Sydney’s two sisters did, which had always confused Sydney at first.
Pen’s little “quirks” were more just sensory things.
With a little research, Sydney suspected she knew what it was. Not that Pen ever wanted to talk about it.
Pen had had a few misdiagnoses as a kid. Pen had been punished a lot for being “quirky” and overreacting to things. Until she’d ended up with Zoey permanently, anyway. By then the damage had been done.
Now, Sydney suspected Pen had just internalized whatever verbal abuse those jackasses had heaped on her and the resulting anxiety made Pen sick occasionally. If Sydney was a betting girl, she’d bet Houghton’s billions Pen had what was known as sensory processing disorder.
Pen had some definite overexcitabilities, too. Overexcitabilities were more common in higher IQ individuals. Pen had the highest IQ of anyone Sydney had ever met.
Pen was a little bit more than justquirkyat times.
Sydney had made it another life goal to reprogram Penelope when the anxiety became too much. She was the eldest of their little group—taking care of the rest was one of the things Sydney just did. “What’s eating at you?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you think I’m weird?” Pen turned those big dark eyes on Sydney and just blinked. The hair was still blue from about an inch below her ears to the tips, almost to her waist now. Pen had extremely long, straight dark-brown hair. That was liberally streaked with turquois blue.
She was always complaining that, besides the hair, she looked like a teenage boy. Like, well, her sixteen-year-old brother Simon, to be exact. There was some truth to that.
“Of course, you are. You skipped three grades and then earned your first BA by eighteen. That just doesn’t make you normal.”
“You skipped a grade, then graduated another half a year early. And then graduated college in three and a half years. That puts you two years up, right? But you’re normal.”
Sydney didn’t necessarily feel normal at all. Mostly she just felt… broken. “Am I? I don’t really feel normal, Pen. Not anymore.”
She looked over her shoulder. There was a bodyguard walking discretely behind her. Another walked behind Pen. “I don’t think either one of us gets to be normal again. I’m starting to accept that.”
“I’m debating getting my PhD in psych. Seeing if I can figure myself out a bit more than I have.” She scowled, looking very much like her brothers Caine and Rafe in the moment. “There was a stupid professor this morning. He thought I was a freshman and shouldn’t be allowed in an upper-level graduate course. And he tried to kick me out of his precious class without even asking why I was there. He said it was a serious class; I had to laugh at him after that. But he had the information all wrong.”
“And what happened then?”
“I reeducated him. And got kicked out, anyway. No big deal. I don’t want to learn from someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I told him that, too. And then I told the rest of the class where to find the correct information. Half of them walked out after me. Rather wasted time there. But now there’s a hole in my schedule. What am I supposed to do with it?”
