I made sure Mom and the twins got home safe—Emma hanging out the passenger window like a fucking puppy, shouting something about how the estate had better WiFi than our shitty apartment, but Mom was having none of it.
She'd gotten this look on her face, this absolutely not expression that I've seen exactly three times in my life: when I tried to explain cryptocurrency to her at age twelve, when she found out I'd been skipping school to code, and when Dad—well. When he left.
She was scared of being alone in that big house. That was the truth underneath it all. Scared of the silence, the echoes, the way the hallway would feel too long and the rooms too empty. With Charlotte basically living at the estate now, working with me and Anastasia and ARIA, Mom only had the twins for company.
Emma and Sarah, her built-in chaos agents, the two person wrecking crew that kept her from going full empty-nest existential crisis.
She couldn't let Emma go. Simple as that.
