"Mom!"
At first, I was sure that they were my words. I was sure I had said it, because that was all that kept going through my mind—Mom, Mom, Mom, over and over and over. I thought it had been me, but when my mother let go of Dad's hand and ran to Grandma, I knew that I had thought wrong.
Mom ran into Grandma's arms, landing with such strength and certainty and undeniable longing that I was surprised Grandma didn't fall over. It knocked the wind right out of her, but once Grandma got her bearings again, she held on tight, and I didn't think she would ever let go. Which was just as well, because I didn't think Mom would ever let her.
Grandma is a lot of things. She's ex-CIA. She's a headmistress. She's a wife and a friend and a sister by many meanings of the word, but there, her daughter in her arms, she was unapologetically human. "You're alive," she breathed. "You're alive."
"I'm sorry," Mom mumbled into Grandma's shoulder. "I'm so, so sorry. I wanted to call you. I wanted to call so many times, but—"
"But it would have blown your cover," finished the familiar voice of my grandfather. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, or maybe he just existed everywhere. Surely the Joe Solomon was capable of such a thing. "That's what this was, right? You needed to lay low? To make sure that certain people thought you were dead?"
Mom pulled away for face him, an act which Grandma didn't seem to appreciate very much. She gave a nervous chuckle, rubbing one hand over the opposite arm. She shrugged. "Learned from the best, I guess."
Grandpa Joe shook his head. "I didn't teach you this, Cammie," he said, cool. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought that he wasn't angry beyond belief. Except I did know better. Boy, did I know better. "We've been looking for you."
Mom didn't try to joke this time. "I know. I'm sorry."
"Thought you were dead," he went on.
"Joe, I'm—"
"Your dad was my best friend, Cam," he said, not letting her get another word in—or better yet, not letting her give another excuse. "I lost him to the Circle. I did it. And now, I've had to spend the past year wondering if I lost you to the same people." He shook his head again, like he was too tired from looking at her, so he dropped his gaze. "We really thought you were gone this time."
She nodded, slowly, like she wasn't quite sure of herself. "That's what I needed," she said. "For you to be safe. You needed to think I was gone—for good."
Okay. So at this point, I should probably mention that I don't fight with my mother. I fight with Dad all the time—that's just kind of how we do things—but Mom? No way. Nuh uh. No thank you. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't dare raise my voice at her, but I firmly believe that absolutely nothing about that night could be considered normal. "So that's it then?" I said. "You were just going to leave? Take off and never see us again, without so much as a goodbye?"
If Mom saw the fire in me, then she didn't react accordingly. Normally, people would brace themselves. Prepare themselves for the explosions that Morgan Goode was capable of. My mother did no such thing. When she looked at me, I was three-years-old again—a toddler throwing her tantrums.
"Hey, kiddo," she said with an exhausted smile. She looked happy to see me, which she totally shouldn't have. When she started to close the gap between us, I held my ground, not willing to help (but not exactly willing to take a step back, either). She pointed to my chest and said, "I see you got my message."
I looked down, watching my mother's pewter pendant catching the light of the room as it swung. I only had it by luck. The chain had slowly been falling apart, so much so that it had almost disappeared on Dock Twelve. Thankfully someone had picked it up and—
No. Not someone. Mom. My mother had picked it up.
She had left it on my desk in my room—she had been in my room and I hadn't even known it. How could I have been so stupid? Of course it had been her. I had seen her at the docks. I had seen her across the river, sniper in hand.
Sniper in hand.
Will. My mother had killed Will.
The metal suddenly burned, through my shirt and through my very skin, branding itself all the way through to my heart. I looked right at her when I clutched at the pendant and tore it off, the chain breaking with a satisfying snap.
And then I let Gillian Gallagher's, Matthew Morgan's, and Cameron Goode's necklace fall to the floor without so much as a second thought.
Mom wasn't smiling anymore.
Here gaze tightened into a glare—a look I'd seen plenty of times when I hadn't eaten my vegetables. Ha. How childish of a problem. How childish of a threat. Didn't she know that I had grown up? Didn't she know that empty glares and empty punishments didn't do anything to me anymore? I had grown accustomed to empty. Emptiness was my middle name. Surely she knew that she would have to do far worse.
And then it occurred to me that, no, she didn't know. She didn't know just how much I had aged in the past two years, because she hadn't been here. She had left.
I opened my mouth to say so—to let her know just what was going through my mind, but the only sound I heard was a bark. Then two more.
I followed the sound over my shoulder, spotting a black Labrador as he rounded the corner. The blue vest and the harness were both gone, but I recognized the puppy immediately and knew that someone had just been caught listening in on a conversation that he hadn't been invited to.
Finn followed his dog out, slow and sloppy and more than a little embarrassed. The expression on his face was familiar to me. Busted, it seemed to say. Caught lending an ear where he hadn't been supposed to. "Mr. O'Reilly," said Grandpa Joe, a warning in his voice. "The mess hall is on the other end of the building."
Finn perked up, excuses ready. "Is it?" he said, faking innocence. "See, I knew I took a wrong turn somewhere. It's this whole blindness thing—really throws a guy off, y'know—"
But then Finn's puppy barked again, right at the feet of Mom's red-haired friend. The man bent down, giving the fur a good shake, and I totally didn't expect him to say, "Hey there, Bruiser."
And I really, really didn't expect to hear Finn O'Reilly say, "Dad?"
I'd like to tell you more about that whole thing. I really would. But before I could even think of which questions I wanted answered, I heard a door slam open and I took an involuntary step back.
Rebecca Baxter is not someone that I would ever try and piss off. In fact, Aunt Bex is at the very tippy top of my Do Not Anger list, so when she stormed through those doors, I held my breath, hoping that she wasn't there for me.
It turned out that she was there for my mother, which she announced not with a call of her name or any sort of greeting, but rather, with a good, firm, Bex Baxter slap across the face.
Mom's whole body moved with the slap, but she didn't look like she was going to fight back. It was almost like she had been expecting it—in fact, it was like she had been expecting worse.
When she stood upright again, her hand was cupping her face, but I could still see Aunt Bex's handprint splotching up underneath it. The two of them stood their ground, Mom finally pulling her hand away and rolling her shoulders back as she greeted my aunt with the coolest, calmest, "Bex."
Aunt Bex was huffing and puffing so hard that I thought she might be off to blow someone's house down. Jaw set and eyes fixed, Aunt Bex's voice was just as steady as my mother's when she asked, "Are you safe? You're not hurt? How's your head?"
"I'm fine, Bex."
A nod and then another slap, even harder than the first. When Mom reeled back into her stance, she looked like she had been expecting that one, too, but Aunt Bex didn't seem to notice. It was like nothing had happened when she said, "Good. I'm glad you're back."
I'm glad you're back. It was like the two were out for a stroll in the park or like they were seeing each other for the first time after summer vacation. At least, that was what it felt like until Aunt Bex wrapped her fists into the collar of Mom's shirt and pulled her in close.
This, finally, made all of the federal agents in the room take a step closer, as if to stop a murder in its tracks, but they all froze as Aunt Bex spoke, not one of them daring to face a scornful Rebecca Baxter. "I cannot believe you," she said. Her voice was low and dangerous and suddenly I knew why she was one of the world's leading specialists on enemy interrogation. "I can't believe what you have done to this family and I can't believe what you did to me, but most of all I cannot believe that you didn't learn your lesson the first time."
"I wasn't alone this time," Mom defended, her eyes flickering to Red Head. "I had backup."
"I'm your bloody backup!" she growled. "Zach is your backup. Joe, Rachel, Abby, Townsend, Jonas and Liz, even Charlotte and Ellie. We are your backup. We thought you'd died. We thought you'd really done it this time. You crashed your plane in front of me, Cam. You asked for me specifically and then you made me watch—do you know what it's like to watch your best friend fly herself into the ground?"
"But I didn't fly myself into the ground," she said, still too calm. Still too distant. Whatever had happened in the past year had made her harder than I remembered. Or maybe some part of her had always been this hard and I'd been too busy noticing the mom to notice the agent. "It was a remote set up. I jumped into the Thames before it even started to fall—trick I learned from an old friend."
Aunt Bex grabbed her harder. "Don't you make light of this, Cam. I thought you were dead. I spent hours trying to figure out why they couldn't find you. I thought—"
"I missed you too, Bex."
And that was when I realized that Mom and Aunt Bex were speaking in code. That the two of them had a language that no one else could understand. When Mom said those words, it was like watching Aunt Bex melt, her shoulders loosening, her grip dissolving. That brutal chokehold morphed into an even more brutal hug and I realized that even though Aunt Bex was mad on the surface—really, really mad on the surface—she was mostly just relieved to have her best friend in her arms again. "What in the hell were you thinking, Cam?"
"I'm sorry," said Mom, holding on just as tight as Aunt Bex was. They looked like they were about to squish each other. "I had to make a judgment call."
Next to me, arms crossed over his chest, Dad let out a very purposeful, very audible huff. "Is that what we're calling it now?"
Everyone said that my father and I were alike. That neither of us was capable of halfway. I'd felt that fire in my chest more than enough times to recognize it in him, and so I took a step back, knowing that I didn't want to be standing in the middle of what was about to come next.
Mom pulled away from Aunt Bex. She and Dad looked like they wanted to be closer, but couldn't quite find the courage to let it happen. "I'm sorry," she said. "I owe apologies—and I know it's going to take a while before those apologies start to mean something.
I know that. But Zach, I made a judgment call, just like I was trained to do."
"That's funny," Dad said. "The term that came to my mind was abandonment, but I guess my dictionary's a little out of date."
Grandma winced at the word, Grandpa Joe just beside her with a gentle, "Zach."
Everyone says I'm like my father. I've been warned about his flame time after time, but it was my mother they should have warned me about, because she doesn't have a flame. Nope. My mother is the flame. "I made a judgment call, Zach. And yeah, maybe it didn't work out the way I was planning, but there was no good way to do it, so I picked the least painful option."
But fire can't burn fire, so Dad didn't shrivel. "Least painful?" he spat. "Least painful for who?"
"For everyone!"
He laughed, cruel and harsh, some sort of dark, twisted humor consuming him whole. "Well I'd hate to see what other options made that list, Cam, because I'll tell you, we have had one hell of a time back home."
Mom didn't back down, but she didn't look at him anymore either. "I made. a judgment call."
Dad closed the gap between them in two long, even strides and even though no slap came, I felt myself jump as if it had. In a blink, his hands were gripping her arms and he was forcing her to look at him. To see him. To understand him. "You don't get it, do you?" he said. "People like us—we don't get to make judgment calls."
"Why?" She tore her arms away, but neither of them took a step back. "Why am I not allowed to screw up? Is it because we're the best at what we do? Because we're dealing with some of the most dangerous people on the planet? Sometimes spies screw up, Zach. Even the best—"
"You think I'm pissed at the spy?" he asked her. The room was too loud. It was making my head hurt. Making me dizzy. "Cam, I'm angry that you didn't use the dead drop to tell me you were okay. I'm mildly upset that you chose Red Head to be your partner. Those are things that the spy did, but I'm not pissed at the spy. I'm pissed at you."
"I'm a spy, Zach. It's in my blood. It's who I am—"
"We're parents, Cam!" His voice echoed off stone, so loud that I was sure even the boys in the mess hall could hear. Oh, the rumors that were sure to fly—Mr. Goode, back again after a night with his wife. "The only judgment call we get to make is what color tie our son wears under his graduation robes or—or whether or not we take out daughter to a hospital after she starts hearing voices."
My mother's breath caught. No response. The legendary Cameron Goode—caught off guard. She wasn't the only one. As the whole room turned to me, I felt a little caught off guard myself.
Someone cleared their throat and, thankfully, the eyes left me and landed on Scout. He looked tired, his scrubs covered in more blood than I cared to measure. He pulled his mask down around his neck and said, "Matt's stable."
The whole room froze, waiting for the catch, but there was none and Scout started to smile. "It's going to take a long time and we still need to check his head, but it looks... good. He's—he's going to be okay."
To say that the room was relieved would be a massive understatement. The room seemed to deflate as the news set in, everything sinking except for the hearts of the people listening in, which flew higher than the heavens.
Except Scout caught a glance at me, then to my mother and father, the two of them standing as if they were still feuding it out. He'd heard my father's words, no doubt, but more importantly, he'd seen the look on my face after they were said. "Come with me," he ordered.
And then, just like that, the flame in my father flickered into smoke, and he left my mother's side to join mine. "What is it? Is she okay?" he asked. "I'm coming with her."
Scout put his hand up in front of my father's chest and Dad wasn't sure if he was supposed to be angry or impressed. Scout looked like he didn't much care what my father decided to do, just as long as he did it away from me. "No," he said. "You're not."
It was a bold and unexpected move from Scout Jasons. When I looked up, I thought I saw his armor shine.
But then he realized exactly who he was talking to and he dropped his sword. His hand, however, stayed up. "It's been a long night, Mr. Goode. I'm sure she's fine, but I'm just going to give her a check-up. Make sure we don't have any surprises in the middle of the night."
He still looked hesitant, but, like it or not, Dad knew that Scout was worth the trust. So he trusted him.
With Scout's arm around me, the two of us made our way down the hallway, but that didn't stop me ears from listening in on the conversation that we left behind. "Has she really been hearing voices?" Mom asked.
Dad paused, taking a breath before saying, "Yeah. No. I don't know. Yours, we think."
"And panic attacks," Mom added. "That boy told me she was having panic attacks."
"Yeah," said Dad, his heart not in it. His mind somewhere else.
"Well what kind? Are they severe? Does she need medication or—?"
"I don't know." The words were violent and raw, years worth of exhaustion packed behind them, finally crumbling away. "That's my point, Cam. You're the one who went to school—you're the one who knows how all this brain stuff works. It would have been really nice to have my informed teammate backing me up when all of this started to go down, but hey." He laughed again. That same, cold laugh. "Guess you were too busy making a judgment call."