The first half of Aidan's arc in book four of the Dartmoor Series is a bit like a car crash: terrible things are happening, you know people are going to get hurt, but you can't look away, as fascinated as you are horrified. Aidan's the sort of guy who's skated along in life, with little regard for the consequences, never over-taxing his moral compass, and in Secondhand Smoke, those consequences hit him in a major way. I've always looked at it like this: he's not someone who was going to have an epiphany one day and decide to get his act together; his transformation was always going to be a reaction to an outside stimulus. In this case, stimuli: three major catastrophes unfold for him here, all of them demanding that he take hold of his life and become - at least in the ways that an outlaw biker can be - a better man.
Readers typically hate Tonya, and I can't say I blame them. She's a spoiled rich girl brought up in a very different world from Aidan; she has everything she could ever want, and treats Aidan like garbage. For her, sleeping with him was a walk on the wild side, a careless fling just to see what it was like. She thought he was hot, but there's a part of her who loathes herself for "slumming it." Mix physical attraction, revulsion, and shame, and you've got one wicked affair. The thing about Tonya, though, is we never get inside her head. We never walk through the story with her - and that's very much on purpose. We're privy only to how she behaves toward Aidan and his family, so our view of her is heavily skewed. I've had readers argue that it seems "out of character" for her to have carried the baby to term rather than terminate the pregnancy, but the simple fact of the matter is, readers have seen only one side of Tonya. They don't know her. Aidan doesn't even know her. While a woman's right to choose is an important topic, this book isn't about that. In SS, she does make a choice. The question here isn't "well, if it were me, I would have..." because this book, as with every other that a write, is not examining instances of "what would most people do." it's what would these particular people do. Tonya has her reasons, but because she's so guarded and vicious with Aidan, and because we never slide into her POV, the audience doesn't get to hear them. The audience doesn't need to hear them, frankly.
The important thing here is: Aidan's about to be a father. That was always the plan for him, giving him a baby; giving him a baby birthed by a mother who thought she was too good for him, and who didn't want to be involved in any of it. There could have been a story there, of Tonya softening, growing, of loving Aidan. I think there's a part of her deeply saddened by the whole thing; a part of her who knows that, had she let her guard down, could have loved Aidan, and that terrifies her. That's the thing about writing characters as if they were real people: there are always different paths you could have taken. There were the makings of an Aidan/Tonya endgame, however slow and painful it turned out. Just like there could have been an emotional, angsty endgame for Ian and Tango - albeit one very different from what we end up with in Loverboy.
There's a theme I go back to again and again with this series: that of history repeating itself. Because history does repeat itself: on a large scale, and on a small scale, among families. In Fearless, Maggie reminds a furious Ghost again and again that Mercy and Ava's relationship isn't so different from their own. In fact, Maggie was a year younger when they first got together. Ghost's anger is commonplace in the real world. The hypocritical anger of "do as I say, not as I do." He wants his kids to be smarter and more successful than he was. But Ava fell in love young with a dark man, just like her mama.
And Aidan set his sights on the wrong woman the first time around, just like his daddy. Aidan's in the same boat Ghost was in, back then. A single father, his child's mother going off to live her own life with a different man; she's going to have children that she mothers and cares for, but doesn't want his child - just like Olivia.
It's that repeating history that has Maggie and Ava so furious and dogged in their insistence that Aidan keeps the baby rather than put it up for adoption. It's a purely emotional mama bear response from both of them. Maggie remembers little eight-year-old Aidan asking her for help with his homework. And Ava remembers the baby she lost to violence, without her having any say in the matter. Every character involved brings his or her own experiences and prejudices to bear on the situation.
Not to use a child as a plot device, but...The baby is the root of the conflict. She's the impetus for change. Fatherhood is going to make Aidan grow up fast. The baby will force him to grow, and it will create friction for him and Samantha, who's everything Tonya couldn't be for him.
The two other big fiascos in the book are very different. If getting Tonya pregnant was an act of thoughtless irresponsibility, then the reappearance of Greg, by contrast, is the result of an act of mercy. And juggling these two things, Aidan's caught in his own drama, and not aware that his best friend is slow sliding into darkness. I'll talk about those two issues in the next post.
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