He gets the faraway look he’s adopted over the years whenever he talks about her. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. All of it,” I say.

He laughs. “That could take a while. How about I just start at the beginning, and eventually, sometime over the next couple of years, I will finish telling you what a remarkable woman she was.”

I smile. “Deal.”

He sighs, looking up briefly. “Your mom was the most brilliantly strategic student the Academy had ever seen, that I had ever seen. The first time we spoke, we’d only been there a week and she walked right up to me in the dining hall and said ‘I don’t hate people because of their Family. I certainly have a few members in my own that I would rather not claim. I hate them because of their character. Let’s hope yours doesn’t suck.’ And as much as I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t like her and that her opinion didn’t matter to me, it was impossible. Everyone cared what she thought; she was one of those magnetic people who smiled and turned perfectly composed assassins into babbling mush. So of course I tried to impress her.” He winks at me.

“Did it work?” I ask, finding myself leaning into his happy memory.

“Not even a little,” he says. “Took me two years before I got her to smile at me and another six months before I convinced her to sneak out of her room and spend time with me.” He looks at the fireplace, remembering. “People always assumed that we were enemies who eventually fell for each other. But the truth is, I was head over heels from the beginning.”

“Dad, why didn’t you ever tell me any of this? Why did you keep it from me?”

My dad nods like he’s been waiting for this question. “It was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done, sending you off to the Academy without telling you about Strategia, without telling you that everything was going to be okay. But if I had told you then, it would have confused and hurt you, putting you in danger and damaging your ability to complete your mission.”

While I’m not sure he’s wrong, I still don’t like it. “Okay, so maybe telling me right before would have been a mess, but why didn’t you tell me before that? You had seventeen years.”