I nodded because, let’s face it, I totally knew the feeling.
“What do you…I mean, what do we tell Grandma and Grandpa?”
Mom’s hand stroked my hair. Her voice was soft and low. “There’s nothing we can tell them, sweetheart. As far as your grandparents know, their son is already buried in the family plot in Nebraska. To tell them any different now…”
“Of course. Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “They shouldn’t have to go through this. They should get to stay…at peace.”
“I agree.” Mom nodded. She smiled. Peace seemed like the operative word. When I looked at her, I knew I wasn’t the only one who had been searching, running. Everything was different now that my father was officially “in from the cold.”
“Joe and I have been talking. We think maybe in a few months, when he’s stronger, we might have another service—something small. Would you like that?”
Would I like to bury my father? Again? I sighed when I realized the answer. “Yes.”
“And there will be a ceremony at Langley. They’re keeping his remains there for now, and we can go up when the semester’s over if you’d like.”
“Sure,” I said. “Okay.” I didn’t want to talk about it anymore—none of it. I’d already done enough talking with Dr. Steve.
“What is it, Cammie? What’s bothering you?”
It seemed like a ridiculous question, and I wanted to snap at her, ask her where she wanted me to begin. But when I opened my mouth, the only words that came out were “I lost the key.”
Okay, I don’t know what I had expected to say, but that totally wasn’t it. And yet, there it was—the one thing I hadn’t had the strength to say to anyone. Not to my roommates. Not in my sessions with Dr. Steve. And not to Zach.
It was my father’s final mission—the very last thing he’d asked me to do, and I’d failed. So I searched my mother’s eyes and told her the thing that hurt the most right then.
“In Dad’s letter, he said there was a key. Summer Me must have gotten it out of the box, and now it’s gone. He left that for us.…He might have died because of it, and I—”
“Cammie, no. Do you hear me, no.” My mother sounded angry and scared. She reached for my shoulders and turned me to face her. “Do not worry about this. Your father’s legacy was not some key. Your father’s legacy has not been locked up in a Roman bank vault for the past five years—it’s been here. On this couch. With me.”
Her grip tightened.
“You are your father’s legacy. And all he would care about—all I care about—is that we still have you.”
Tears filled her eyes, but she didn’t move to wipe them away. “Do you know that?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Okay.”
Neither of us spoke again for a long time. It was a sound I was used to. When you grow up in a house full of spies, you grow accustomed to silence. Life is classified. There is always so much that goes unsaid.
“That week—before he left—he took me to the circus, did I ever tell you that?”
“Well”—Mom laughed—“you both spent the next couple of weeks eating leftover cotton candy, so, yes, I knew. For an excellent spy, he was a terrible sneaker.”
“He seemed so happy.”
“He was happy, sweetheart. He loved you so much.”
“That was a good day,” I said, curling up beside my mother.
“There were a lot of good days,” she said, and I knew that it was true. I closed my eyes, felt my mother stroke my hair, and the music was softer then, in the very back of my mind as I drifted off to sleep, knowing my mother was with me.
There were still good days to come.
Chapter Thirty-three
It wasn’t until Friday morning that I noticed the book that Liz was carrying, reading under her desk while Madame Dabney lectured at the front of the room.