Abby, Get Your Groom!. Victoria Pade

are rich and powerful...” China said over her coffee cup.

      “The supervisor’s factory was taking a vote that day about whether or not to unionize. If that factory had voted to do it, it seemed like the workers in the other factories would, too. Gus—”

      “He’s your father, you know? You could call him that.”

      “It just doesn’t seem like it,” Abby admitted. Despite all the years she’d thought about someone coming to claim her, now she wasn’t sure she wanted to claim him.

      But she didn’t tell China that. When China was seven years old she’d found her mother dead from a drug overdose on the kitchen floor. With no idea who her father was and no other family, China had gone into the system. But she remembered her mother and the time they’d had together. She loved her mother in spite of the addiction that had killed her and put China in situations that China still had nightmares about. Through it all, China still claimed her.

      Given that, it made Abby feel a little ashamed to admit that she wasn’t eager to do the same with Gus Glassman, that she didn’t feel much other than shame for what she’d come from.

      Rather than calling him her father or Gus Glassman, she said, “He was at the factory to intimidate the supervisor so the vote wouldn’t be held. Employees testified that they were all afraid when they saw him. When he walked in, a lot of them decided not to vote at all. But the supervisor stood up to him and...” Abby shrugged. “They fought. The supervisor was killed. The newspaper articles also said that Gus had a police record stretching back to when he was a teenager. It was for minor things but still—”

      “Okay, so he wasn’t a saint. But if he was a good dad to you for those two years, that’s something.”

      Abby knew that was how her friend would look at it because that was how China viewed her own years with her mother, forgiving her mother everything because her mother had loved her. But China’s mother had done most of her harm to herself. She hadn’t killed someone else.

      “At least I guess I can be glad that Mark isn’t around for this,” Abby said then.

      “I’m glad he isn’t, too. He’d just make you feel worse about it!”

      That was true enough.

      “It’s kind of hard to feel good about it, though,” Abby confessed then. “Look farther down in the article—there’s a picture of the supervisor.”

      China did.

      “He looks like he was a nice guy, doesn’t he? The article said he was a devoted member of his church. That he worked with the church’s youth group and was a volunteer with Big Brothers—that means he was someone who tried to help kids like us. He was about the age we are now when he died. He had his whole life ahead of him and my father took it from him.”

      “Okay, your father did something bad. But maybe he wasn’t a bad person. You know I trashed that mean girl’s bike when I was ten, but that didn’t make me bad through and through, did it?”

      “The mean girl was sooo mean to you,” Abby commiserated, having heard the story about the year of constant abuse her friend had taken at the hands of the other kid. “But this isn’t the same,” she insisted. “And I don’t know, China. I know I should just be happy to find out something about myself. But—”

      “You hoped it would be something to be proud of. But what were the odds, Ab? How many kids in foster care over the years did you run into with the kind of stories we’ve made up about you?”

      “None,” Abby admitted.

      “It’s like everything else about us—we have to take what we can get and make the best of it.”

      “Because if we reach for more, like I did with Mark, we live to regret it,” Abby added.

      “That guy was a jerk who didn’t appreciate what he had. Maybe the Camden hottie is smarter than that.”

      Abby was grateful for her friend’s loyalty but it didn’t change the facts. “Right,” she said facetiously. “Like there would ever be anything between the Camden hottie and me. You and I also know what it means to be in the system and the way people see us because of that—even before they hear something like this.”

      Add to that the status and prestige of a Camden? She hadn’t even been good enough for an upper-middle-class systems analyst like Mark. She’d really be barking up the wrong tree with Dylan! And it was something she knew she had to keep in mind now.

      Now, when—despite having so much to think about with her suddenly disclosed past—she’d still found herself also thinking about Dylan Camden. And recalling every detail about that face and body. And mentally replaying everything he’d said and the sound of his voice as he’d said it. And picturing his every expression, his every gesture, his every nuance. She even kept closing her eyes and remembering how his cologne smelled like a forest filtered through clean mountain air, and the way his hair had felt when she’d cut it, for crying out loud!

      “If you don’t want to give him a chance does that mean I can?” China challenged her, yanking Abby out of the reverie she’d drifted into.

      “No,” Abby said quickly and firmly, making her friend laugh.

      “I didn’t think so,” China said, as if she’d known it all along. “And our hottie wants to help you find out everything you can about your family?”

      Abby tried not to recoil at the our part of that and say he was her hottie. Which he wasn’t. But for some reason she was inclined to make that possessive correction and had to fight not to.

      “I think Dylan and his family are on some kind of guilt trip over this,” she said instead.

      “Well, that says something good about them, doesn’t it? They—or at least their relatives—were the ones who put the wheels into motion that left you without anyone to take care of you. Somebody should feel guilty about that.”

      “To answer your question—yeah, Dylan wants to help find out whatever can be uncovered.” And to be by her side when they learned about her family—Abby kept coming back to that and to how much she liked it.

      Well, how much she appreciated it. It wasn’t that she could let herself like that he’d be with her.

      Because she was out of her depth with him, she repeated to herself like a mantra.

      And it was bad enough that she kept having that sense of him as some kind of reinforcement, she certainly couldn’t let herself come to depend on it in some way. She knew better than to depend on anyone. Well, anyone except China.

      “I’m still gonna keep my fingers crossed that he digs up good stuff,” her friend said. “Maybe not gold coins or diamonds or a crown, but all good stuff from here, and that you’ve learned the worst there is to learn.”

      “I’m gonna hope for that, too,” Abby said.

      “But since today isn’t the day somebody waved a magic wand and made us rich, I guess we’d better get dressed and go to work, huh?” China said then, glancing at Abby’s wall clock.

      They both stood and took their coffee cups and cereal bowls to the sink.

      “Want to get a pizza tonight?” China asked in the process.

      “I promised to meet Dylan at the special events shop after work to show it to him—he needs to check it out for security because he says this wedding has stirred up media interest or something. I don’t know how long that will take.”

      “I’d say I’ll wait for you but maybe he’ll take you somewhere after...”

      “It’s just business. The family wedding and this looking-into-my-background thing—that’s all there is to it and all there’s going to be to it,” Abby insisted.

      China