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“Alright,” Raleigh said once he and Mako had pulled out of his parents’ driveway and they were on the road back to their hotel. “You’d seen them in the Drift, but how’d real life compare?”
Mako hummed a thoughtful noise, tilting her head to one side as she considered.
“You know,” she said after a while, “the strangest thing for me was how… nervous I was, walking up to the door. I thought I wouldn’t be nervous, because I already knew them, you know? Because I had already met them in the drift. But walking up to their house, I realized that while I already knew them—already loved them, even, because I had experienced your version of them, with all of your emotions toward them already attached—even though I had these clear, beautiful pictures of them in my mind’s eye, they had never met me. They had no idea who I was. And I was worried for a moment that. Well, that they wouldn’t like me.”
Raleigh laughed, a sound that was as hearty and whole as his rough-and-tumble Anchorage upbringing.
“I’d say you can safely put that worry to rest,” he assured her. “I think they kind of wish they could swap us out. A brilliant daughter for a lunkhead son.”
“And can you blame them?” Mako asked, smiling her least resistible smile.
Raleigh shook his head, and the earnestness in his blue eyes made Mako feel like shaken soda.
“Not even a little.”