His old nickname for her, from the early days when he hadn’t been able to say Piper. He hadn’t used it in so long that just the sound of it was like coming home. It’s enough, she told herself. This life’s enough.

“Love you more,” she whispered.

Chapter 14

“Sorry not sorry.”

Gavin waited until late that night when the house was dark and silent to sneak out. Back in the days of his wild and crazy and very confused teen years, he’d snuck out a lot. That had involved escaping through his second-story bedroom window, climbing along the ledge to the corner of the house, and shimmying down a tree.

On those nights, he’d rarely had an agenda. All he’d known was that he’d grown up in a world so far from this one, a wanderlustful, amazing, crazy world in which he’d seen every continent and more cultures than most people knew existed. He’d not known anything different until he’d been sent here after hell had broken loose.

A hell of his own making that had started and ended in the DRC. There’d been strict rules for him and his sisters there, and a “yard” they’d had to stay within. Going past that into the jungle had been forbidden. In fact, that had been Winnie’s first full sentence when she’d been three years old: “Don’t leave yard.”

So of course Gavin and his BFF, Arik, had gone into the jungle in the midst of a storm. And they’d walked right into a gang of local drug runners. In the ensuing fight to get away, they’d been separated. Gavin had heard the shots and run until his side hurt. He’d tumbled into the yard. Alone. It’d been hours later, when the storm had been gaining steam by the minute, that Arik’s body had been found.

The very next day, he and his sisters had been sent home by their parents, who promised to follow shortly.

They’d died in the flooding from the storm before they could get out.

To say after all that, that Gavin had been a hard-to-handle kid, one who was angry and grieving and generally pissed off at the entire world, was an understatement. Suddenly his skin had felt several sizes too small, and he’d been crawling up the walls, his brain filled with so much inner turmoil he didn’t see how he could possibly go on.