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Zoey turned. To look into eyes as dark as her own.
Her sisters stood there. Two of them. She looked back at them, momentarily surprised again by how much they resembled each other. Seeing so much of herself in women who had started off as strangers still had the power to shake her.
The sounds of someone coming up the gravel between the bay of storage sheds had her silent for a moment. As she waited. A tall, extremely skinny, dark-haired teenager with blue streaks in her hair and a tiny diamond nose ring came crunching over the gravel between the storage units. Talking to herself.
There she was—the baby sister Zoey had raised from the age of eleven. Her world for so long.
Paige, the sister three years older than Zoey, patted her on the shoulder. “We didn’t think you needed to do this alone. And I was in the area, dealing with FBI bureaucrats on a case that went sideways—and shouldn’t have. So here we are.”
“This is it?” Ariella asked quietly. “All that’s left of Denise’s…things.”
“This was what Luc said the movers he hired to box up her stuff found. This has been in storage since the police cleared her apartment,” Paige said, looking around the small storage shed. The complex itself was owned by their brother’s corporation in St. Louis. He had storage complexes in almost every state. Luc liked to diversify. “Everything was so chaotic the week she died. Denise’s things weren’t a high priority for anyone. Most of us just wanted to forget back then.”
“Luc’s people packed it well, at least,” Zoey said. Everything was rigidly stacked; boxes were precisely labeled. There was furniture as well. If there was anything of worth, she couldn’t really see it. No. The only real worth that woman had left behind was the children she’d sold like cattle. Andtheyhad changed people’s lives for the good. They did it every day. Pen, too, was already talking about psychology and finding ways to help families reuniting in the future. To make adifference.“We’ll have to donate the furniture. What people can use, anyway.”
“I can call one of the guys. Have them bring a truck.” Ariella ran her fingers over a headboard that had cartoon stickers all over it. Simon’s. Those stickers hurt to look at. It had to be even worse for Paige now. Simon washerbaby now, just as Pen was Zoey’s. “Marc is with his brothers. We can probably make two trips. There’s that charity furniture store a few blocks past Mamaw’s Place.”
Zoey looked at her sisters. “I’m just here for answers. That’s all. I don’t really want to know her. I just want to knowwhyshe did what she did. And who else she did it to.”
The nightmares were in her sisters’ dark-brown eyes, too. The understanding and the pain.
“I know. And we’re right here next to you.” Paige surprised her when she wrapped one arm around Zoey. There was a wall of reserve around Paige, from the years when she’d had no one. Zoey had a wall so much like it of her own. “So let’s do this. Nothing Denise did back then will change what we can have between us now.”
Ariella came to Zoey’s other side and grabbed Zoey’s hand in her own. “She might have robbed of us of knowing each other as children, you know, but we won’t be robbed of a future together now. We’re sisters. Nothing will change that. And it’s up to us to decide what that looks like for all of us.”
“Yeah, Mom. So let’s get to this. You’re getting a bit watery there.” Pen, again, from Ariella’s opposite side.
Family and belonging was not something she would ever do easily. But maybe with time, she’d get there. “Then let’s get started.”
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Ariella lifted a box off a stack. The whole stack wobbled.
Zoey and Paige reached for Ariella immediately. Ariella could be a bit clumsy. It was hard not to want to protect this little sister of hers. Ariella was the sweetest of them all.
Ariella helped Paige steady the boxes—and their sister. Then took the next box in the stack for herself. “Anything that might hint who she was or who her parents were or where they came from. If we can find other family, maybe we can find out where else she spent her time. Or figure out what the woman was really after, besides cold hard cash. There are other far easier ways to make money than by getting pregnant and selling the offspring. Most people who use aliases, use something somewhat familiar to them. If we can crack her code we can go from there.”
“Nikkie Jean changed her name to hide from her father,” Pen said, opening the nearest box. “But I think he’s nice.”
“Just because he tried to give you a percentage of Finley Creek General Hospital for your eighteenth birthday,” Ariella said. “He is a very nice man. We’ve had dinner with him several times to discuss the Carrington Group buying so many struggling hospitals in rural Texas. Marc likes him a great deal.”
“I think Nikkie Jean just likes to torment him.” Because Nikkie Jean was afraid of what the familial ties would bring. The hurt. That kind of hurt was exactly why Zoey had been resistant with reunifying with her brothers and sisters herself. She understood it. On a very deep level. Sometimes, she still felt like she was on the outside, going through the motions, with the family she had now. With them all—but Pen. Zoey was determined to fix that. Somehow. “She pesters him just to see how far she can push him.”
Birth families, separations, pain—thatwas what Blessed Reunions wanted to help ease if they could. Before the shooting at the choir hall, Zoey would have never imagined wanting to be a part of helping separated families reunite.
Families had always scared her a great deal, no denying that.
But now, family mattered. Opening her eyes in that hospital room to her brothers being there, to Paige and Ariella and Pen sitting with her on a rotating schedule—it had mattered. More than she had ever realized. Family wasn’t just the ties between them because of the shared DNA. Far from that, they were her family because they wanted to be. Just like she wanted to be a part of theirs in return.
It wasn’t as easy for her as it had been Pen to connect with their found siblings. Zoey had made certain Pen understood from the moment she was old enough that Zoey loved her, would always be there for her. She’d never wanted Pen to feel as alone as she had.
She would never forget the almost eleven years she’d lived before her baby sister had come into her world at less than a month old. If nothing else, Zoey wanted Pen to know Zoey loved her. Forever. But not for the first time, she wondered who had loved Denise long before her children had become commodities? “Denise had a family she came from, too. We just have to find it.”
“Luc said he vaguely remembers someone who resembled her visiting them. Before I was even born. An aunt or something. But he was only four or five at the time. Denise had a parade of people in and out around him. She’d leave him with strangers constantly. He doesn’t really know who any of them were. He remembers a really tall man, too. He used to think the man was possibly his father. He remembers the man showing a real interest in what Luc was doing. Being around a lot. But now, he thinks that man was white, with blond hair. So we know he wasn’t Luc’s father. He was probably a boyfriend. Maybe the guy Luc remembers was my father—who knows, right?” Paige lifted the lid off the box. “Whoa. It’s amazing this hasn’t combusted in the Texas heat, even in the air-conditioned unit.”
Paige pulled out a bottle of Scotch and stood it on the old desk nearby. Followed by four more bottles of alcohol. The cheap kind. “Mama liked her drink. Simon said she was drunk more than she wasn’t.”
Most of their search into their mother’s past had started from whatSimonremembered from when he was a kid. A traumatized eleven-year-old kid.
“What exactly did she do for a living?” Pen lifted old magazines out of another box. She flipped through them before putting them back in the box, sneezing from the dust. “These are just old books and magazines. Nothing really good except these books. Is it possible that Denise liked to read?”
