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“Not legally, but yes. When I realized you were gone, I wanted to find you, adopt you and raise you as my own. You were mine. I had you for seven years. But the bureau stopped me. Your father and I weren’t married. He was so angry he wouldn’t relinquish his rights over to me. I could’ve petitioned the courts after his death, but my superiors ordered me to stand down.”
“I get it. You chose your job. Where’s my biological mother? Obviously, she didn’t want me either.”
Rosemary reached over to hold Byte’s hand, but she quickly moved it so Rosemary’s hand hung in the air.
“She died before I was there. She was killed by a drunk driver. I think that’s what drove your father into pushing drugs. The driver was high and walked away unharmed.”
“So he decided to honor my mother by selling drugs like the one that killed his wife?”
“I think in his mind, he associated the drugs with the man living. He reasoned that if your mother had been drinking or taking narcotics, she might have lived.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Obviously, he’d taken too much of his own product to have any logical reasoning in his head.”
“I know her death hit him very hard. He wasn’t a bad person, just a criminal that had to be taken down. We needed to stop the drugs from entering the city. Anyway, your father did try to step away. He quit his job, we moved to Galveston, and we were making real progress until he was pulled back in.”
“How long was he out of the business?”
Byte doubted it was for very long, not if he was so easily pulled back in. Actually, she wasn’t sure why it even mattered.
“Never mind. I want to know about why the bureau wouldn’t let you take me.”
“My section chief is a PITA. You know a pain in the—”
“I know what it stands for,” Byte interrupted.
“Of course you do. My boss was a stickler. He’d ordered me to wrap the case up, but I wanted to have legal rights to become your mother. My boss, however, wanted the case closed. So instead of waiting until I had all my ducks in a row, he had your father arrested while I was away. I don’t believe for one second that my training date wasn’t intentional. But at the time, I didn’t have the experience to know how to fight him.”
“And in the last twelve years… what have you done?”
“Some of it I’m sure you know. I married a wonderful man and we had a child. My husband died a few years ago from a blood clot that reached his heart. He died quickly, too quickly for me and Darla to prepare for the loss. Darla is my daughter. She’s nine and very independent, which I guess children are these days. I hope you’d like to meet her, if not today, then sometime in the future.”
Byte wasn’t sure she was ready to meet the child she kept. She understood finally why the British call their children the heir and the spare. She most definitely was not the heir.
“We’ll see.” That was all she was willing to commit to.
“I did look for you. I tracked the homes you were sent to. From what I could see from the outside, they seemed like good places.”
“Things aren’t always the same on the inside.”
“I got that feeling. But I lost track of you when you were sixteen. I knew you’d emancipated yourself. That was public record, but after that, you were a ghost. I’m assuming that’s when you changed your name.”
“Yes.”
“Why GigaByte?”
“It’s what my friend called me. He was the one who taught me how to use a computer. He said my head held all the data he was teaching, as if I was a gigabyte of memory. It came natural to me. When I stopped being Danielle, I went to what I knew and became GigaByte.”
“You’re pretty well known in the federal community.”
“I know. I’m on watchlists, most wanted, and tons of black market sites.”
“Aren’t you worried you’ll be caught?”
“If I am, I am. I learned early on that I have zero control over my life. I may choose a path, but ultimately I can’t guarantee it will be a wise or safe road.”
“And your employer, ALIAS. Do you like it?”
“I do.”
