“Not like that, you brat. He said he’d seen my kind once before. In Alaska, swimming under the ice. He never told anyone, because he was sure they wouldn’t believe him. He asked if I’d let him study me. He said he was going to school to be a human doctor. He said he’d give me a place to stay, and he’d pay me.”

“An exchange. Kind of like Dr. Milligan and Galen.”

“Who?”

“Oh,” I say. “Dr. Milligan is a marine biologist who works at the Gulfarium in Florida.”

Mom raises her brow. “That trip you took to visit Galen’s dying grandmother? That was to see Dr. Milligan?”

I nod, not bothering to hide my cringe.

Mom sets her fork down. “Exactly how much does that man know about us?”

“Everything. But you don’t need to worry about it. He’s known Galen for years.”

“Oh?”

I roll my eyes, unwilling to let go of this juicy story in favor of fighting over Galen’s trustworthiness. Besides, she’s being a hypocrite. She trusted a human—my dad—so why can’t Galen trust Dr. Milligan? “So … it wasn’t love at first sight then? With Dad? You fell in love later?” I don’t know why I feel disappointed. I don’t even believe in love at first sight. Except where it applies to my parents being perfect for each other. And anyways, isn’t that a kind of child-myth that all kids want to believe?

“Sweetie … It was never love.”

Screw disappointment. Now I feel gut-kicked. “What do you mean? But you had to … Then how did I…?”

Mom sighs. “You were … the result of a moment of … weakness on my part.” But she takes too long to choose her words. I wonder what she thought of first, instead of “weakness.” Pity? Stupidity? She dabs her napkin at some imaginary syrup at the corner of her mouth. “The only weak moment we ever had, which is kind of extraordinary. Not that I regret it at all,” she says quickly. “I wouldn’t trade you for anything. You know that, right?”

I wonder if “I wouldn’t trade you for anything” is also a child-myth. “So I was an accident. Not even the normal kind of accident. Like, a one-night stand, or a oops-I-didn’t-take-my-pill accident. I was an oops-I-accidentally-mated-with-my-fish-experiment accident.” I put my head in my hands. “Lovely.”

“That man loved you, Emma, from the moment you were born. He’d be very upset to hear you talking like that right now. Frankly, I am, too. I was not some experiment.”

I bite my lip. “I know. It’s just … a lot, don’t you think?”

“That’s why we’re going to have two pieces of strawberry pie, Agnes,” Mom says, her voice strained.

I pull my stricken face from my hands and force it to smile. “Yes, please,” I say. I’m beginning to think Agnes isn’t a waitress for financial gain. I think she needs gossip to thrive. There’s no way a normal waitress would be or should be this attentive.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Mom chides when Agnes leaves. “Your father and I were very good friends.”

“This is so weird.” It hurts my feelings on behalf of my dad, which is stupid, because according to Mom, Dad was aware of all this friendship crap. And apparently, he was okay with it. “Did you ever tell Dad about Grom?”

“I told him everything. He always thought I should go back. Try to straighten things out. But after you were born, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to risk them keeping me, or finding out about you and coming to get you.”

We stop talking then. Maybe because I’ve met my threshold for mind-blowing information. Maybe because Mom’s met her threshold for being vulnerable. Whatever it is, we both seem to realize at the exact same moment that we just actually bonded, and now everything feels awkward, like old times. And that if we stay any longer, there might be some unspoken pressure to bond again.

“We’ll take some boxes for the pie and the check, please, whenever you’re ready, Agnes.”

* * *

In a few hours the sun will rise and we’ll have been driving for a solid twenty-four hours, only stopping for gas, coffee, or the resulting bathroom breaks. My hands feel like permanent fixtures of the steering wheel. When I finally do get to peel my fingers from it, they’ll surely be forever curled in place.

Fog hovers over the road in thin strips that look like layers of gauze floating above it. The rising sun will dispatch all those layers soon. After breakfast, it will be Mom’s turn to drive again. I glance at her, dozed off in the passenger seat. Either she’s starting to trust me again, or she’s got some way of knowing if I steer us off course.

The sad thing is, I am trustworthy now. I can’t let Galen find us until I’m ready for him to, until I have a plan B all sorted out in the event that he’s the one lying. But my trustworthiness has nothing to do with why I might steer us off course. We don’t have our cell phones, which means we don’t have GPS, which means I should be paying attention to road signs, which means I shouldn’t be blinking for more than two seconds at a time like I am.

It’s just that this road is so straight and boring with hardly any other cars and I can’t turn the radio on because Mom is sleeping and since Mom is sleeping there’s no one to talk to and—

Whoa. My eyes must be playing tricks on me.

Did we just pass Rachel?