“I now have a goodly number of clients,” she shared. “Enough I’m nearly full time. I have money coming in, my own accounts, my own cards. Of course, I bought that condo using your father’s and my accounts to get financing, but I’ll be able to afford it as I do not intend to serve thirty-six years of duty at your father’s side and let him cheat me out of my due. He can have the house. I hate that house. It’s boring. He can have the cars. I don’t want to drive a Jaguar. I want a Mazda. One of their smaller-size SUVs. I test-drove one. They’re zippy. I just want the money. And I’ve engaged an attorney. Colorado is a marital property state. Your father can make it ugly, and he can make it drag on, but he can’t circumvent that. And we already have a strategy. Demand everything at first, but since I don’t want anything but half of our liquid assets, the investment portfolio and his retirement, he’ll feel like he’s won when that was all I wanted in the first place. And we both know, it’s very important for your father to feel he’s won, even if he hasn’t.”

Seemed she now had her ducks in a row.

“Sounds like a good strategy,” he noted.

“I hope so,” she murmured, reaching again for her water.

After she took a sip and set it back, he called, “Ma.”

She looked at him.

“I’m proud of you. I’m happy for you. And if he fucks with you, he’ll never see me again.”

She didn’t look happy about that.

“Axl.”

“I’m being very serious.”

“It has pained me for years, how he treated you. More, how I didn’t intervene. And I offer no defense for either. But, darling, he does love you and that would destroy him.”

“Then he better not fuck with you.”

“You really shouldn’t say the F-word, sweetheart,” she murmured. “It’s vulgar.”

He grinned. “I’ll refrain when I’m around you.”

She looked horrified. “I hope you don’t use it around Hattie.”

“Hattie’s a millennial, Mom. We’ve embraced the F-word. We don’t think of it as a curse word at all.”

She burst out laughing.

Christ, she looked pretty laughing.

He tried to think of the last time he saw his mom laugh.

He couldn’t remember.

Jesus.

He also hadn’t been a very good son.

“I didn’t look out for you either,” he admitted.

“That’s not your job.”

“Yes, it is.”

She shook her head, not in a negative, in a “What am I gonna do with my boy?”

“We need to do this more often,” he told her.

“I’d like that,” she replied, a light beginning to shine in her eyes that wasn’t pretty.

It was gorgeous.

“Then we will.”