Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty-One

My mother is an intimidating woman. That is just a fact. People don't get as good as her without learning how to throw a punch. Without learning how to take a hit. Without learning how to fight. She was the type of person who didn't take any kind of funny business. Cameron Goode was a woman of the law.

But she was more than that. She was my mother.

She had read us bedtime stories. She had played hide 'n' seek with us. Mom had been the person so full of love and support and hope over the years, and now she was just there, waiting for one of us to say something. It broke my goddamn heart.

"You should go to bed."

Ha. Nice. The first thing she says to me. "Do you seriously think that enforcing bedtime is your number one priority right now?" Even as the words came out, I could practically hear my father telling me to take it easy. As usual, I didn't listen. "We should be talking about the op."

Mom leaned back against the arm of the sofa and for a moment, I saw it. The exhaustion. The circles under her eyes and the crack in her smile. For a moment, Mom was old, and she was tired, and she just wanted to stop fighting. "You yell at me when I speak to you as a spy, you yell at me when I speak to you as a daughter—I don't know what you want from me Morgan Ann."

"How about you talk to me like your daughter who is also a spy?" I snapped. "How about you stop seeing me as one thing at a time, Mom?"

She laughed—it was that laugh that all parents had. Look at how naïve she is. Look at how little she understands. I hated it. "Sweetie, no matter what you call yourself, you're always going to be my little—"

"Don't say it, Mom," I said, bolting up off the couch. I was back to pacing, just like I had so many times in Phineas' office. "Don't call me your little girl. Listen, you were gone. You were gone for two years, and maybe it didn't feel like a lot to you, but those were the longest two years of my life."

"You think that it was easy for me?" she asked. "Do you really think that I was on some sort of vacation?"

"No, Mom. God would you just—?" I stalled in my steps. This was the problem. This was why we could get a single goddamn conversation going. To her, I was a child. To her, I wasn't much more than someone to play board games with. As far as she was concerned, I was supposed to be a listener. "Just hear me out for, like, two seconds. I know what you did wasn't easy. I know why you did it—I'm not even mad about that anymore."

"Then what is it, Maggie?" she said. Part of her sounded pissed, but most of her sounded desperate. "What are you so angry about?"

It was a good question. One that I didn't have an answer to. I had spent all this time being furious with my mother, and I didn't even know why, so I just looked at her—watched those brown eyes watching me—and I tried to come up with an answer for her.

No such luck.

"I don't know, Mom," I told her. "Aren't I allowed to just be angry?"

"Sure," she said, but she had this look on her face. Stoic—academic, almost. The psychologist at work. "But anyone who stays angry for this long has a reason for it."

"Are you psychoanalyzing me right now?" I asked her. "Because if there's one thing I hate—"

"What is it, Maggie?" she said, and it was really more of a dare than a question. "You're pissed about something."

"I'm pissed about a lot of things, Mom," I told her and for a moment, she wasn't Cameron Goode. She wasn't trained personnel. She was Mom. Just Mom. "I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, but I've kind of spent the last two years on top of some sort of kill-list, alongside my brother who, as you recall, I had to save from a torture chamber. On top of that, they told me my mother was dead and I've gotten crazier and crazier by the day—which, as it so happens, is exactly what happened to my dead, crazy grandmother, apparently. I spent a summer at a specialized training camp where I learned just how to be a traitor to the causes I've fought for my whole life and then, when that was good and done, one of my best friends, who was also a traitor, by the way, was shot down by—"