Tracey shook her head and cut off a bite of her waffle. "So, you don't mind if I sleep with him?"
Callie rolled her egg in the salt. "No, I don't care. Sleep with him as often as you want, but do it safely and don't put a lot of stock into it."
"You know, most kid's parents would have a heart attack if they heard a conversation like this."
"Two reasons why that doesn't matter to me: one, I am not your parent; two, I am saying this to you and no one else."
"Good point."
Tracey ate more of her waffle.
"You know, T, I don't want you to think of me as your mother. Really, I don't."
Tracey just looked at her.
"It's just, I know I have practically raised you; and sometimes I feel like I am your mother, you know? But I'm not your mother. I'm not Sharon, and I don't want to be."
"I know you're not Sharon. You're not an asshole. You didn't abscond to live in the fucking Pocono's with your twenty-year-old lover. I do, though, look to you as a kind of surrogate mother. I think it comes with the territory. Like you said, you practically raised me. It was inevitable, I think."
"Nothing's inevitable if you catch it soon enough." She took a bite of her egg.
"Perhaps. You know, I wonder what he saw in her, Dad and Mom. I just don't know why they ever got married. It seems like they were an odd match from the beginning."
"I thought so, too, but according to him they were crazy in love when they met. You know, they met when they were only seventeen, and they got married soon after."
"God, what idiots. I couldn't imagine meeting someone and then having a kid with him two years later. That must have been hard on them."
"That is why they gave him up. They were not at all ready to be parents, and they knew it."
"I wonder what he's doing now, that boy."
"Couldn't tell you." She started to cut up her waffles. "Did I ever mention that I tried to find him? When I was in Montreal, I hired a P-I to see if we could find him. I was just so curious."
"No, you never mentioned that. Did you have any luck?"
"The guy never got back to me. I hired him not two months before I left. God, Brady was so creeped out by it. He was terrified that I'd end up being his sister." She shook her head. "He asked me to take a DNA test. I told him he was out of his mind."
"A DNA test?"
She nodded, "He wanted to see if our chromosomes were enough of a match that we could be siblings."
"Did you do it?"
"Yes, finally, I succumbed and we went to this clinic downtown, explained everything to the doctor, and got the blood work done. I couldn't stop laughing the entire time. The doctor thought it was pretty funny, too."

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