“I wish Tara and Penelope could come for Thanksgiving,” said Ava, looking sheepishly at her husband.
He shook his head and kissed her. “Then, invite them, Avarie. Aine was saying the duplex was too big for just her.”
“What do you think?” asked Ava.
Aine nodded and smiled. “We should definitely invite them. It’s been too long since the Tribe of Five was all in the same place at the same time.”
They’d all met in boarding school when they were seven years old—and had been best friends since. It was only after they all graduated from Barnard that they began living separate lives.
From the beginning, the thing they had in common was that each of them had terrible relationships with their parents.
When they were younger, they’d collectively decided Quinn had it the worst. After she arrived at boarding school, she and her mother saw each other so sporadically. At times it was like Quinn didn’t have any parents at all.
She didn’t find out who her dad was until she was twenty-one years old, and even then there had been some question as to whether Doc was her biological father. The night before her wedding to Mercer, Quinn and Doc opened the e
nvelope that confirmed he was.
While Quinn’s story had a happy ending, Ava and Aine’s didn’t. Shortly after the very same wedding, they found out their father, who had lived his life with them as Conor McNamara, was actually Makar Petrov, a black market arms dealer. Over the course of the next several months, he’d tried to kill her, Ava, and their half-sister, Zary, in order to get his hands on money he’d put in their names when they were born.
Aine shuddered. There was no reason to dredge up those memories again. The nightmare began with the man they’d once called “Daddy,” and still hadn’t ended even though he was dead.
Tara and Penelope had terrible relationships with their parents too, but nothing as dramatic as what she and her sister or Quinn had gone through. For them, it was the stereotypical scenario of their fathers turning in their “older wives” for newer models every couple of years while their mothers were angry and bitter about it.
Regardless of the situation, it was rare that any of them spent holidays with their families.
“I’ll send an email on our way to the airfield,” Aine told her sister.
Maybe if the Tribe of Five was back together again, they could help Aine get her head back on straight and get her mind off of Striker Ellis.
—:—
Striker sprung for a first-class ticket even though it was a quick flight from Portland to the Central Coast. He’d originally planned to leave last night, but decided to spend some time in the city instead. He spent three hours going from shops to restaurants to other shops, eating his way through downtown and buying gifts with no intended recipient. Each thing he’d picked out was because he thought Aine might like it—and he obviously couldn’t give any of the gifts to her.
It wasn’t as though he could give any of his purchases to someone in his family. In the first week of March, he’d received word that his last living relative had died.
His sister, Pam, had battled drugs and alcohol all her short life, until one day, her body had simply given out.
As for his parents, his mother had left home when Striker was in Kindergarten. He barely remembered her. Three years later, his father had skipped town and left him and his sister all alone. His mother’s only sibling, Dorothy, took him and Pam in. He was eight at the time, but his sister was fifteen and had no intention of living by their aunt’s strict rules.
Looking back on it, Dorothy hadn’t been that strict. The rules she made were reasonable. It was just that his parents hadn’t lived their own lives with any self-discipline that would provide stability for their kids.
When his aunt passed away, he was the only one at the cemetery on the day she was buried. He realized then that he was alone. For all intents and purposes, he had no family left—they’d all abandoned him.
A few weeks later, a woman claiming to be his mother had showed up at the CIA headquarters, high as a kite, demanding her share of whatever he’d inherited from Dorothy. When he informed her that there wasn’t any inheritance, she told him to expect to hear from her lawyer.
He did eventually hear from an attorney but not about any inheritance. Instead, the man had been attempting to collect past-due medical bills on behalf of Striker’s deceased mother. When he suggested the man look for her husband instead, he said that he did, and had found he had passed away a few months before her. That was how he found out both of his parents were dead. One phone call. From a lawyer looking for money.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sheer bag that held the delicate pair of garnet earrings he purchased because they matched the bracelet he gave to Aine at Christmas, the one that had belonged to his Aunt Dorothy, and that Aine had tried to return to him when he broke things off with her.
It wasn’t the phone call from the lawyer looking for money for his mother’s medical bills that had made Striker end his relationship with Aine, though. It was what he learned from the one he received informing him of his sister’s death.
He closed his eyes against the memory of what had turned out to be one of the worst days of his life despite having done what he had to do.
Aine came into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and joined him at the table.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, opening the door for him to act sooner than he’d planned to.
Striker shook his head. “It isn’t.”