Free Viking Bay by M. A. Lawson

caregiver.
    Whatever the case, the kid was bright, motivated, and self-sufficient, and Kay had once told a friend that living with her daughter was like living with a really smart, independent cat—a cat who didn’t want anything to do with its owner. After Kay risked her life and her career to free Jessica from Caesar Olivera in Mexico, they became closer, but they were still more like good friends—or maybe sisters—than mother and daughter. Jessica called her
Kay
, not
Mom
—and that suited them both.
    And this is what had fascinated the Callahan Group’s psychiatrist: how Kay had dealt emotionally with giving up Jessica for adoption; how she felt about becoming a full-time mother; why she had risked her life and career for a child she barely knew. Kay had told the shrink that she didn’t feel guilty at all about giving Jessica up for adoption. At the time, when she was only fifteen herself, she thought that was the right thing to do. As for risking her life to save Jessica from the Olivera cartel . . . Well, that’s what a mother would do, she’d said, realizing that sounded contradictory and illogical.
    â€”
    â€œHOW WAS SCHOOL TODAY?” Kay asked as they ate dinner. The minestrone soup was marvelous, better than anything that ever came out of a can.
    â€œOkay,” Jessica said. “Just the usual stuff, except a guy came over from GU to give a talk on stem-cell research. That was cool.”
    Cool?
    â€œHow was work?” Jessica asked.
    This was another thing Kay didn’t like about her job: She couldn’t talk to her daughter about it. When Jessica first moved in with her in San Diego, they didn’t talk all that much because Jessica didn’t like ortrust her. Kay would make the attempt, however, to engage her in conversation and she’d talk about DEA cases and how the legal system worked or didn’t work. After she rescued Jessica from the Olivera cartel they talked more, but it still wasn’t easy to talk to a person who thought stem-cell research was
cool
. Then they moved to Washington and Kay went to work for the Callahan Group and she couldn’t say anything about her job.
    She had told Jessica almost the truth: She said she worked for a private-sector company that was like a defense contractor, meaning it dealt with classified matters she couldn’t legally talk about—and Jessica said she understood, and she probably did. It most likely bothered Kay more than it did Jessica that she couldn’t talk about the job. She couldn’t even tell her about the training she was taking.
    Anna Mercer had told her: “You tell people you’re going to jump school at Fort Benning, taking diver training with SEALs at Panama Beach, learning basic breaking and entering, and how to speak Farsi. . . . Well, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that you’re being trained for covert ops.” So when Kay had to be gone for a few days, she again told Jessica a limited version of the truth: The company is sending me someplace for training, but I can’t say more.
    Because Jessica was so mature, Kay wasn’t too worried about her when she had to go out of town. She also had her friend Barb Reynolds and the lady next door, who’d raised four kids, check in on Jessica when she was gone. All Barb and her neighbor ever said to Kay was:
God, I wish my kids had been like her when they were her age.
Kay had no idea how Jessica would have turned out if Kay had raised her as her own child, but she was damn sure she wouldn’t have turned out so well.
    There was one issue, however, that had become a major source of tension between them: Jessica had acquired a boyfriend since they moved to D.C. She met him the first week of school and there was some sort of instantaneous nerd electromagnetic attraction. He was atall, gangly kid with a mop of dark red hair, and Kay had to admit that he was cute. He was also a