It had been weeks since Dani had mentioned Parker around the house. One day, she'd come home with her face drawn in tired, frustrated lines, tears still wet on her cheeks, and had simply stopped talking about him. Her father had watched her with the wary look of a man who knew he was better off not asking, and had maintained an equally steady and stubborn silence on the matter since then. Her mother had tried to talk to her, several times, but though the words varied every time they went through the motions, each argument started and ended the same way:

Honey, let's talk about this.

Mom, there is nothing to talk about.

If you're upset, there's --

I am not upset, but I am going to be if you keep asking me about it.

Daniela Marie Rymner, you are not going to talk to me in that tone.

Then I guess we aren't going to talk!

And then it was over, and she was slamming the door to her bedroom, and her mother was stalking down the stairs with her hands in the air and a scowl on her face. This went on for weeks, long, tense weeks, until one day, Dani finally walked into her parents' room, looked right at her mother, and said: "Parker and I have been fighting for a really long time."

Just like that, she was crying again, even though she detested it, and her father was up and out, knowing that he was as far from useful as he could ever be. She crossed to her mother's open arms, all but threw herself in them, and let herself be rocked like when she'd been four years old and had fallen and bumped her head.

After a time, she calmed down, but only enough to stare blearily across the room, hiccuping every once in a while as the dregs of her cry faded and her head cleared. Madelynn's hand stroked down the length of her hair, her cheek resting atop the crown of her daughter's head, and she sighed.

Dani sighed, too.

"What happened, baby?"

Not, what did he do, because she knew her daughter. Not even, whose fault was it, because when it came down to it, it was never really one person's fault, and that wasn't the important part, anyway. Dani took a moment to simply gather her thoughts, arms slipping around her mother's waist, before she quietly recounted the story. Lunch, the letter, the argument. Her voice didn't even gain heat when she described it, just remained steady and low, her head slowly rising and falling with her mother's chest as she breathed. A long silence followed, Madelynn gathering her thoughts, Dani finally berating herself for letting her temper take control and blind her to Parker's side of the argument.

She'd been so stupid. She had been immature, and even though she still felt betrayed, even though she still believed with everything she had in her that he shouldn't have lied to her, she couldn't entirely blame him for the way he'd responded to her. She could blame him a little, because she was young and she was still convinced he'd been as much in the wrong as she had, but she just didn't have it in her to be as angry with Parker as she had been.

In the end, she knew she'd always been more hurt than angry, but that was a tough, coarse pill to swallow, too.

"That's a pretty bad fight," Madelynn finally said, pausing a moment to lean back, force Dani to look at her. She combed her daughter's bangs from her eyes, smiled at her for a long moment. "Are you still that angry with him?"

Dani closed her eyes, brought her hands up to scrub the heels of them over her cheeks. "No. Well, a little. I'm more... you know, ugh."

Silence passed in heavy beats, and she made a frustrated noise. "I just, you know, it's so stupid. Why did he lie to me? Why doesn't he trust me? He is never going to trust me," and she leaned back fully, clenched her hands in her lap.

"Dani, honey. Have you ever lied to Parker?" Dani's eyes widened, cooled. As she began to speak, Madelynn interrupted. "About anything, baby."

Dani clamped her mouth shut again, seething. After a moment, she admitted stiffly, "Yes, but-"

"Yes, but. Don't you trust him?"

"Yes, but-"

"But you lied to him."

She grit her teeth, stood up to pace across the bedroom. "Mom, it's different, okay? It's different because-"

Madelynn placed her hands atop her knees, arched a dark brow. "Because this is you, and that's Parker?"

It sounded even more ridiculous when she put it that way, and Dani grabbed at her pigtails, giving them a brief, sharp tug. The pain in her scalp centered her, gave her something to focus her frustration on for a moment. When she'd been very young, she'd done the very same thing all the time, so her mother said. Even now, Madelynn had to swallow a smile at the sight of it.

"You are supposed to be on my side," she said finally, shooting her mother a mutinous look.

"I am on your side, Daniela." Madelynn rose then, gently tugged the ends of her pigtails out of her daughter's fists. "Sometimes that means being a little bit mean to you, but that's what you do when you love somebody. Sometimes you give them lumps, and sometimes you take the ones they give you."

Dani's foot itched to stomp, and it was through sheer willpower alone that she resisted. It wasn't that her mother wasn't making sense, it was that she was making too much sense, and she hated to admit it. She didn't know what she'd expected to hear, or wanted to hear, exactly, but she knew it wasn't quite this.

Oh, it was one thing to admit to herself that she'd been immature, that she hadn't given Parker much of a chance, but to hear it from someone else... she automatically wanted to resist it. Because she did, she made herself slow down, actually pressed her fingers to her temples as though she could force patience into herself.

She'd been wrong. That was so damn hard to admit. She hadn't been completely wrong, but she had been wrong, and she needed to apologize. Not for everything, but she couldn't just keep fighting with Parker, if it could even be called fighting. It was more like ignoring, avoiding, pretending that he didn't exist and that he didn't mean anything at all to her. It was harder, somehow, than seeing him and exchanging dirty looks and angry words.

Maybe it was harder because it felt like she was trying to erase what they had been, and she didn't want to do that.

Her mother drew her into her arms, gave her another hug. Dani remained stiff, still unhappy with hearing the truth even though she needed to, but grudgingly gave in. The hug was loose, but the fact that her stubborn daughter relented even a little made Madelynn smile.

"I guess I need to apologize." Her voice was petulant, and after a moment, she added, "So does he, though."

"Yes, but you aren't going to get one if you try to rip it out of him."

"I know." Dani rocked back on her heels, crossed her arms under her breasts. "I'm also going to go see his dad."

It was something she'd been thinking about, turning over in her head, debating since she'd read the letter. Whether Parker would appreciate it or not, well -- she knew he wouldn't. She absolutely knew he wouldn't. Still, she knew with every fiber of her being that it was something she needed to do.

She needed to meet Marcus Damhnait, see for herself what kind of man he was. If he was sincere about trying to make amends with Parker, well, she'd work on helping him cross that bridge when they came to it -- because if he was, Parker really needed to make some kind of peace.

If he wasn't, well. She was going to tear him a new a*****e, and do everything in her power to make sure he left Parker the hell alone for the rest of his life.

"I know this isn't going to make much of a difference, but I feel like I need to ask if this is really a good idea."

Looking up into her mother's face, the exasperation and the worry warring for precedence in it, Dani said honestly, "Probably not. But, Mom, I can't just pretend like Parker doesn't have a father." After a beat, she said grimly, "Even if he does."

"Okay." Mother and daughter peered at one another, and finally, the elder said, "Go scrub your face. You said he's in a rehabilitation facility, right? I'll take you."

Dani launched herself at her mom, rising on tip-toes to kiss her on her cheek, and said breathlessly, "Thanks, Mom." before she dashed to the bathroom.