Claire

I sat across from Mom at a table in the hospital cafeteria. Rogue wasn’t with us, because he’d volunteered to buy the food for us while the two of us waited.

“I hope you weren’t too bored,” Mom said, smiling at me as she braced an elbow on top of the desk and rested her chin in her hand.

“We were fine,” I said with a shrug. “It’s not like we’d have anything to do at home, anyway, so it’s better to be nearby, right?”

Mom hummed, but didn’t reply, looking away, toward where Rogue was standing, purchasing food for us.

Since I didn’t have a job anymore, and I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to be looking for a new one just yet, I’d been appearing at the hospital with Rogue pretty often. Not that we always went together, but it was rarer for one of us to show up alone, so this was something Mom was growing used to. It did bring its own complications, though.

Rogue and I had mostly been walking around outside the hospital, since we would only be in the way if all three of us ended up in Richard’