"Mom ran away from her. They were living in a bunch of basements, like rabbits."
"I rest my case." Again, he cleared his throat. "Look, I don't know the particulars. I don't even know how what you're describing is possible. But I do know that everyone, human or not, deals with this. It's not what you're given that matters, baby. It's what you do with it."
Amy tried to think of something to say to that, but there was nothing. He didn't really get it. This was a material problem, not a mental one. She couldn't go to a counsellor and talk about Portia until she went away. Portia wasn't a bully. She was a cancer. But maybe asking Dad to understand that was too much. His brain was totally different from hers, after all.
She waited, and finally her dad said: "When my dad kicked me out of the family, he said that he was tired of watching me waste time with toys. I know he meant your mom, but I think he was also referring to the kind of life I'd led up until that point. He could never really understand why I liked the things I did, or why I chose the friends I made. He told me there was no upside to any of them. He said I had nothing to gain.
"By itself, that's nothing special. I knew he thought that my hobbies and my friends and my way of seeing things – everything that I considered of any importance or value – were a waste of time. I had known that for most of my life, by the time he finally came out and said it. But it still stung."
"Is this why I've never met him?" Amy asked.
"Yeah. Pretty much. I knew I wasn't welcome, and I didn't really feel like extending the olive branch, either. But that's not the point. The point is that I got over it. And I got over it because I had already met somebody who had so thoroughly exceeded the world's expectations of her that I knew that anything my dad had to say about me was really just a guess."
Amy smiled. "Mom."
"That's right. Mom. And I know she lied to us, and she's not around to explain why, but…" He faltered. "Maybe it's hard for you to understand, having grown up with so many vN, but even just a few years ago, before you were born, emergent phenomena was all anyone talked about. The definition of sentience was changing. Suddenly we were discussing consciousness all the time. And then along came your mother, and I thought, 'If this allegedly artificial woman can overcome everything her designers ever intended for her and think for herself and make her own way, then I can sure as shit quit whining about the lies my daddy told me'."
The next question was the hardest. She tried to think of a graceful way to ask it, but in the end the words just came out plain: "Do you still feel that way?" She plucked at the hem of her bathrobe. A single thread was pulling away from it, and she wound it around one finger until the flesh at the tip turned grey. "Or do you feel like it was all a big mistake?"
"A mistake?"
"Dad, you're in jail. You would have been a lot better off without us."
"Amy, I'm in jail because I happened to be exercising my rights – in a way that the truncheon-wielding jackass who insisted on getting in my face didn't like. And I would not have been better off without you. I love you. From the bottom of my heart, I love you, and I will never stop loving you, no matter how crazy your nutjob granny drives you. Do you understand me?"
As she opened her mouth to say the same, the door slammed open. It bounced on its rails. Amy looked up and saw a blur of motion aimed straight at her before a small pair of arms and legs latched around her tightly and pinned her to the ground. Javier's boys stood in the threshold. Their simultaneous wince was perfectly identical across each of their faces.
"Honey, did you just get tackled?"
"Um – yeah, Dad, I just did."
Amy looked down. Junior took up her whole torso, now. He was longer and leaner, less like a toddler and more like a preschooler. His arms had lost their pudgy little rolls, and his chin felt sharp where it dug into her shoulder. Presently his face rose, and he stared at her with his father's dark eyes and perfect lashes.
"Everything's OK, though," Amy said. "No need to worry. Everything's going to be just fine."
"That's all I needed to hear."
The tooth buzzed for a moment as the line died. Amy reached in, plucked out the tooth, and put it on the table. She sat up. Junior refused to let her go.
"Sorry," Matteo said. "We tried telling him you were busy, but he didn't listen."
Javier entered behind them, carrying a massive coil of fabric under one arm. He dropped it, whistled at it and pointed to one corner of the room, then watched it begin inching itself in that direction. Then he reached over and tousled Junior's curls. "La vi en primer, cabrón." Junior crossed his ankles over Amy's back. Javier nodded. "Oh yeah. That boy's one hundred percent my code."