“I can see that. It’s such a shame though. Mom says they’re dead?”

“They probably are. My stupid defensive move was to move away. Jess was a part of it. But the team didn’t feel healthy. You all were growing up and then we heard the kids of people with powers could get powers. Your mom seemed to accept it as a given that you’d be brought onboard. Your aunt surprised me by agreeing, and I think that was her move… establishing an unsafe bubble, not pursuing civilian life. Powers as a part of everything. Even the damn home recipes. We argued like hell.”

“You sound like my old therapist,” I said.

“Was he a smart guy?” my uncle asked.

“She was a smart lady, yes,” I answered. “I still disagreed with her pretty seriously about what the division between cape and civilian should look like.”

“How’s that working out for you?” my Uncle Mike asked, his eye dropping to the tears in my costume and the bandages that covered just about all of the skin there.

“Now you’re sounding like a true member of this family. That was… very much like my mother,” I said, smiling.

He grimaced, looked toward the front of the room, and the grimace softened. “I don’t think I am.”

I followed his gaze, then glanced back at him.

He clarified, “A member of this family. Related, yes. I definitely share traits with my sisters and parents. But…”

He paused. Struggling to find the words.

I let him.

“…Your mother closed her heart off. She had room in her heart for her sister alone, back when we attended the school. Then for Mark. Then for you and I presume Amelia. I never quite figured in. Your Aunt Sarah, my heart jumps every time I try to think if I should speak of her in the past tense or be horrified that I can’t… she threw herself into her role as Lady Photon. She found someone who could keep up with her.”

“And you didn’t figure in.”

“I wanted two ordinary sisters and one of them didn’t want a brother, and the other didn’t want a civilian life where she might be vulnerable. I wasn’t a saint, either. I was angry and emotional, I acted out. Part of it’s on me. But I don’t think we’ve been family since they were kidnapped.”

“You could take another tack. Say we’re all just one massive, fucked up family, and it’s that twisted nature that defines us as a unit.”

“Or I could keep a safe distance. My life for the past few years has been warm and calm, and I’ve stopped being the angry teenage boy I was after I got sent away to school. I go to your mother’s house for a barbecue, and I lose my cool.”

I nodded, frowning. “What did she tell you?”