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“Out. Everyone. Now,” I command.
The four attendants glance from me to my mother to each other.
“I said out!”
“Go,” Mom tells them as they’re scrambling to their feet, tripping over each other to get out.
Once the door is closed, I pull up a chair and sit facing my mother, looking at her confused expression as she waves her hands in the air to dry the nails.
“I wish I could say it’s nice to see you, but that was simply embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing you was the furthest thing from my mind.”
“They’re going to have to start from scratch,” she says with a glance at her fingernails. “I hope you have a good reason for this.”
She’s barely finished when I slap the report Rick printed for me on the table in front of her. It’s a flimsy thing, and it rattles, an open bottle of blood-red nail polish flying over the edge and landing on its side. It doesn’t break, but varnish begins to pour out of it.
But my mom doesn’t even look. I’m not sure she even heard the crash. Her eyes are glued to that report, and her face has gone deathly white.
“Does he know?” I ask, my voice sounding foreign. The betrayal feels like a fucking knife in my back.
It takes her an eternity to look up at me, and when she does, her vivid blue eyes swim in tears.
“Where did you get this?” she asks, the first of those tears catching on her eyelashes.
“Does he know?”
She shakes her head, wiping away her tears with the backs of her hands, careful not to smear still-wet polish on her cheeks.
I exhale. Because I’m relieved. If Caius knew and kept it from me, that would have been the real knife in my back. Because my brother and I, it’s always been us. No matter what. He’s always been at my side through everything, and I need him.
“Where did you get it?”
“Did Dad know?”
“No. No one did.”
“How about Commander Avery?”
She watches me, studying me, her eyes clear again. They bounce between mine as if she’s trying to figure out how best to answer.
“It’s not a hard question. Did Commander Avery know that Caius is his son?”
To hear it out loud, it’s like a slap to the face both to me and, from the looks of it, to her. She shakes her head slowly.
I get up, push my hand through my hair, and pace the room once, twice. “I don’t understand.”
“Santos, sit down.”
I shake my head.
“Sit. I’ll explain it, but just sit. Give me a minute.”
I look at my mother and see something I’ve never seen before. Fear. It’s in her eyes. If she didn’t keep regular Botox appointments, I think her forehead would be creased with wrinkles. So, I sit.
She pushes her hair behind her ears, something she never does because she’s so hyper-aware of the scar along her temple. She picks up the glass of white wine beside her and drinks the whole thing like it’s water before she faces me and takes my hands.
“I worked for them. I was a kid. Barely seventeen.”
