Sveta touched my arm, rubbing it. A bit of physical reality to bring me back to the moment. I nodded to a question unasked.

“—thinkers will be able to detect it,” Carol said.

Sveta cut in, “I don’t care what your views are on how villains are treated, except, I’m sorry, but maybe I do, wow, and no. Or your willingness to put civilians in the hands of your other daughter, who has blood red tattooed on those hands for a reason, which is more wow. I’m sorry, but what—”

“Sveta,” my mom interrupted her. “I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for—”

“—and I don’t care,” Sveta said, more intense, talking over my mom now. “I don’t care, I don’t care. You’re sitting a few feet from your daughter who spent years with an altered mind because of Amy, and you’re talking about how you’d be perfectly okay with Amy altering brains left and right? I’m sorry, what? What?”

“It’s the matter at hand, Sveta. It may well be happening as we speak. We have to figure out how we respond to it.”

“Mom the fuck up! That’s how you respond to it!” Sveta raised her voice. That turned heads at the other end of the diner.

“I’m trying,” my mom said, sounding as pissed as I’d heard her in a while.

“You’re trying to help one daughter who might be beyond help, and you’re fucking up with the daughter who needs it.”

“Stop,” my dad said. “Let’s end this here? We’re not getting anywhere, and I think we’re talking past each other.”

You barely talked. You let Mom talk and you nodded here and there to show you were listening and taking it in… and you didn’t say yes or no or judge.

“…and Victoria looks like she needs a break.”

Well, at least he paid attention to me in the midst of it.

“If we step away without actually communicating, then it’s going to be a long time before we talk to her again, she’ll get ideas in her head, and communicating next time will be that much harder.”

“We end this here,” my dad told her. “No debate. We’re probably bothering the diner’s owners.”

My mom looked over at him with the most unimpressed look. When I rose to my feet, my dad did too, and Sveta started on the process of extricating herself from the booth.

My dad and I offered her a hand, each of us taking one hand. She accepted without complaint. My mom remained in her seat, leaning back, one arm extended all the way forward, five fingernails resting against the surface of the booth’s table.