The drive home took thirty-seven minutes.
Thirty-seven minutes of sitting with the knowledge that my mother had been strapped to a table with electrodes on her temples while a laboratory-created Gate swirled behind her. Thirty-seven minutes of remembering every time she had looked at me with that particular expression, the one I had always assumed was just maternal love but now recognized as something far more complicated.
She knew.
Maybe not everything. Maybe not the specifics. But she knew something had happened to her. Something that connected to me in ways she couldn't articulate.
Helena had said my mother survived the failed integration with no memory of the experience. But memories weren't the only thing that stuck with a person. Trauma lived in the body. In the flinch responses. In the way someone held themselves when certain topics arose.
My mother had always been slightly too protective. Slightly too fierce. The Red-hot Habanero nickname hadn't come from nowhere.
