“What did you say?” Mara Holden-Kang asks, her almond eyes piercing into her son. Bren grunts. His mother had totally heard him the first time. Why does she have to ask him to repeat himself? “I said, I’m going to reconsider my past decision. I may go to Washington. May.” He emphasizes. He truly dreads the fact that he’s doing this. But he promised Kaia that he was going to talk about it with his parents. Jacob Kang slurps his coffee, and it’s not the annoying, loud kind of slurp, but it annoys Bren anyway. “Did Kaia change your mind?” “Yes,” Bren says at once. “She’s the only reason I’m reconsidering this. And you know, the ‘scandals mostly involving Kaia’ that you saw on the internet, have you checked them lately?” “She wasn’t screwing the

