My mother lifted the gold locket that was hanging around my neck up for me to see. “That Zeke of yours is very paranoid but in this case rightly so.”
She opened the locket, and inside of it was a tiny black, blinking object.
“A tracker?” I asked, staring at it.
“Yep, though I will be having it deactivated once all of this is over. They’ll be with you all of the time anyway, so no need to track your every move with illegal technology,” my mother said brightly. “But in this case, it helped.”
“Then why were you so against it in the first place?” I asked, feeling off-balance from her sudden switch up.
My mother’s cheerful expression shuttered a bit. “I wasn’t against it per se, Lennon, I was just worried you were making a rash decision.”
“When have you ever known me to make decisions like that, Mom? I’m like you and our motto is to—”
“Always tread with caution,” we finished together in tandem.
“I know, Lennon, but what else was I supposed to think? One day you’re looking at me like I hung the moon in the sky and the next you’re hiding things from me and suddenly I’m enemy number one. It was like that time again and I just…”
I frowned. “What time?”
My mother blinked as if she realized she’d said too much.
“Mom…” I warned. “You’re hiding something from me. You, Grandma, Grandpa, and even Carter. He said something weird the last time I saw him.”
My mother shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What did he say?”
“He said you have demons that you’ve been ignoring for a long time.”
She flinched at the words.
“Carter had no right…” she began but sighed, putting her face in her hands. “No, that’s not right. I told myself I would be better at this if I got you back.”
I reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.
My mother put her other hand over mine and looked into my eyes, her face looking more vulnerable than I’d seen it in a long time. “Promise me you won’t hate me, Lennon? It’s been really hard being hated by you these past few weeks.”
“I didn’t hate you. I don’t think I could ever really hate you,” I told her honestly. She was my everything, the woman I’d grown up looking up to, the person I wanted to impress the most, the one I always wanted to help. It was why I had stayed so long at a detriment to myself. “But I was angry at you.”
Now we just needed to figure out what our new normal looked like now that I found another thing I wanted in life.
My mother nodded, letting out a shaky breath. “I have been grieving for your father, that part is true. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved and will probably ever love… but the night before his heart attack he, uh, he asked me for a separation.”
I blinked at her, the information not computing in my brain. I had never seen two people more compatible with each other than my parents. They just understood each other in ways that I would never understand without the ease of a designation click. It was pure hard work and communication between them and here my mother was telling me he wanted to leave her?
“Why?” I asked, disbelievingly.
“He told me that he was worried I was losing myself in the presidency,” my mother said, her tone a bit sardonic. “And that the woman he married wasn’t this robotic.”
“Ouch,” I hissed because… well… he wasn’t completely wrong either.
“Yeah, and before I could try to fix anything he had a heart attack which, you can imagine, hasn’t really helped me cope,” my mother finished her voice shaky.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, pulling her in for a hug. “That’s not something you can control.”
“I could have. He’d been asking me to come back to him for months before that, but I was so busy with everything that I ignored him until it was too late. It feels like I stressed him into that heart attack, sweetheart.”
“Mom, Dad had a penchant for sneaking greasy cheeseburgers and large cokes when you weren’t looking too. Are you going to shoot missiles at every fast food restaurant in the country?”
“I might,” she grumbled darkly.
