“Oh, yes, she was lovely.” My dad smiles and I want to shake him until his teeth fall out.

“She’s a mind reader,” I blurt and, fuck, I really shouldn’t have done that. The glass from my dad’s hand drops to the floor, spilling red wine over his shoes like blood. It makes my stomach roil.

“Okay.” My mom turns the stove off and wipes her hands on her apron. “Let’s all go to the dining room and sit down.”

“Rebecca—” My dad protests from the floor, where he’s picking up glass shards.

“It’s time, Eli,” she says, and the gravity in her voice makes me want to rewind this entire thing and go back to a time where I didn’t know anything. Why couldn’t “ignorance is bliss” have been the lesson my parents instilled in me?

Two minutes later, we’re all sitting stiffly at the dining room table, staring at each other like there’s a bomb on the table that one of us needs to disarm.

“You didn’t seem all that surprised to hear that Chloe was a mind reader,” I say finally, hands twisting frantically under the table. I wish we weren’t sitting down. I wish we could be doing this somewhere I could pace around and smash things.

“She’s not the first mind reader we’ve met,” my mother says calmly, like that’s not the biggest fucking revelation of my entire life.

“What the fuck,” I grit out, furious.

“Adam,” my dad chastises, “language.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to apologize for swearing, you just told me that you’ve known mind readers exist. I now have to recalibrate my entire world view, again. I think I’m allowed some fucking expletives.”

His jaw clenches and he takes his glasses off to rub at the bridge of his nose.

“Fine,” he says. “You’re right.”

“But you’ve known about mind readers for a little while.” My mom tilts her head, and knowing I have the same physical tic makes me disproportionally pissed. “And empaths.”

“Yeah,” I say unapologetically, “I have. But I don’t experiment on them for fun.”

“We don’t do it for fun,” my dad says, and I nearly black out in rage.

“I’m sorry, but what the hell does that mean?” I demand.

“What your father is trying to say is that we’re doctors.” My mother is a stoic column, and every moment she stays calm makes me angrier and angrier. “We’re not some mad scientists who are creating Frankenstein monsters in our labs. We took an oath. We look after people. We make them better.”

“How?” I ask. “Chloe’s friend is seriously messed up from what you did to him.”