cred. l-gallerie
⤓ task #002 - family
Alice Clarke-Heron, 55 (mother) & Patrick Heron, 60 (father)
Before Alice had her second daughter, she lived a strained, stressful life at her mom’s house in Las Vegas. Alice wanted desperately to leave the city, to make different choices and start over. She got pregnant with her first daughter, Ava, when she was nineteen and stopped chasing her dreams of professional dance soon after, instead giving all her time towards her new, very real responsibilities. She started working as a hostess at the fancier restaurants on the strip- whichever place was showcasing the most popular act that season. Alice would watch the resident performers week after week, wishing she was on stage instead of taking drink orders. One year, she met a young billionaire from South London who promised to build Alice her own dance studio if she married him- they rushed to the nearest drive-through chapel before she could fully think about it. Patrick flew back home a week later (he had only been in America for vacation) but promised to be back soon with keys to a house and to a building with her name on it.
Almost nine months after the night they met though, on June 8th, 1997, Alice would gave birth to another baby girl: Wren. Her new husband could handle one child, but Patrick never agreed on having two- never mind that Wren was his own blood. Alice had just been living in deep denial that he would ever warm up to that kind of a domestic life. So she had to choose: Patrick or her daughters, her studio or motherhood. The marriage was always going to be her ticket out- her choice was already made the night she said yes to his proposal. It would be hard to leave Ava, harder to leave baby Wren. But Alice couldn’t turn down the very opportunity she had created to save herself and... start fresh. She used her last paycheck to book the cheapest seat available on the next flight going to England and went quietly one night as her family slept. That morning was the last time Wren and Ava had ever seen their mother.
Ava Clarke, 36 (older sister)
Because Wren was still an infant when her parents left, she only has one (faint) memory of Alice. She never met her father and was told very little about him. The girls’ grandmother raised them for the first few years in Alice’s absence, but Ava made it clear to Wren early that they were better off apart from their mom. “We can handle it on our own,” she would insist, and they always did. Ava started renting her own apartment as soon as she graduated high school. The two of them started living together after Wren’s sixth birthday. She decided that her little sister would be the center of her life from that point onwards. She worked multiple jobs around Vegas, but operated as a grifter on occasion to pay the bills. Ava would lift credit card info from customers at the restaurants she waitressed at, or pocket small valuables from the hotels she cleaned on weekends. She didn’t make a habit of it though: they didn’t really need it, it just helped with the occasional large expense. Sometimes that expense was rent or medicine or new phones; something practical. Most of the time it was to rent a car and drive out to Zion for a long weekend. Or take the week off and book a fancy suite to escape their one bedroom for a bit. This was Ava’s way of making up for Alice leaving them all, and doing for Wren what their mother could not.
Ava tried to hide the stealing from her sister, but Wren put it together soon enough as she got older. It became harder to believe that her sister’s bosses kept giving her bonuses or an extra cut of tips. Wren wasn’t dumb and she’d been paying attention for a while. (Ava wasn’t as smooth as she thought all the time anyways.) So of course she did the same thing- only Wren did it better. And took it a step further. She would skip school and spend her day in hotel lobbies, at tourist attractions, walking through any store she could find. She took ID cards, passports (if she found them), wallets, anything out of bags or pockets from tourists. She could con a few people out of their own cash on a good day- it was easy for her to read a person and give them a lie they wanted to believe. Plus, without Ava, Wren could pretend to be someone else, someone older and different. Any other vacationer who was only in Vegas temporarily. Wren eventually figured out how to forge basic documents, social security information... entire personas behind the credit cards and IDs she would steal for herself to use. She became great at deceiving people online and in person by the time she was a senior. Wren went after the wrong mark later that summer however, realizing a little too late that they were part of the local authorities and she could face real charges. So she had to choose: give up her freedom or save it. Face her actions or start running.
It was simple for her to plant evidence on her computer that framed her older sister as the culprit, and herself as the oblivious one. The very real evidence of Ava’s theft at work only made Wren’s statement that much more convincing to investigators. Those words have stuck with Wren since she said them out loud. They never really leave her head. She left Nevada before the case went to court, not wanting to stick around to hear Ava’s defense. Wren cashed out her account and fled to Connecticut where she began to rebuild her life. She tells herself that Ava chose to protect her one last time, but... she hasn’t decided if she even deserved it in the first place.
the Coltons (non-existent)
“Willow Colton” is an identity that Wren created and started using once she settled in New Haven. This is what Yale and the general public know about her: Willow’s parents are both consultants for a travel agency and were rarely home, so she never really knew them. She grew up with her grandma in Houston where the rest of her father’s family lived. She has no siblings, but she was close with a few of her cousins around her age. They were the ones who got her into music, encouraged her to sing and try writing. She is at Yale on a partial scholarship, and her parents send money every month to help her pay the remainder tuition. They’re too busy to talk much so this is really the extent of their relationship.