Chapter 1
"Did you tell them you were pregnant?"
Her mother bites her lip and looks down.
"Any time?" you press.
She makes a small moan.
"Why?" you ask, exasperated.
“If anyone had found out I was pregnant, they would have put me under so much surveillance that I would never have been able to escape LARC and W.I.N.G.S. and all that,” his mother explodes. "Yeni would have been born in a laboratory and you might not have been born at all."
Your mother's face is burning with shame and regret. She grips the back of the office chair. She exhales slowly.
"I didn't know if there was anyone I could trust other than Anita and Siobhan." Her voice is calmer now. "That's not how I wanted to do things, it's just how things happened."
"Wait, you call grandma 'Anita?'" you grimace.
Your mother seems a little strange.
"Well," she says, speaking deliberately, "I love Anita as a mother, but she's not - she's not my mother. In fact, we're not related."
"Excuse me?" You wink at her.
"I guess you could consider this as me being adopted?"
You'll need a minute to process this.
Raised voices interrupt their conversation, echoing through the hallway.
“That sounds like Alex,” you say.
At the same time, his mother says: “It looks like the Commander.”
"Who's that?" you ask each other simultaneously.
Before either of you can explain, the shouting gets louder and the two of you head down the hall to find the problem.
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