Of Poseidon 02: Of Triton

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?
    No, it couldn’t be. It wasn’t even Rachel’s car; Galen just bought her a classy little white BMW. The one that passed was a four-door blue something that Rachel wouldn’t be caught dead in. Except, the driver looked like her twin sister. All big hair and red lipstick and matching acrylic nails draped menacingly over the steering wheel.
    I adjust the rearview mirror and follow the blue car with my eyes without blinking, until my eyes feel like they’ve pickled inside my head. Just when I think we’re in the clear, just when I think I’m letting my imagination run wild, the blue non-Rachel car stops. Makes a sloppy U-turn. Starts speeding toward us with hazard lights flashing.
    Fan-flipping-tastic. I stomp on the gas. “Mom, wake up. We’ve got a problem.”
    She startles awake and whips a suspicious glance around as if I’m the one who’s kidnapped her . Nice. “Where are we?”
    “I don’t know, but Rachel—the woman we told you was Galen’s mom—found us. She’s behind us in that blue car. What do you want me to do?”
    Mom’s head jerks around to the back window. She curses under her breath. “Who is that woman? How did she find us?”
    “She’s