Triple Point

Chapter 20: Familial Interrogations

Lunch took place in the backyard on the family's well-worn picnic table. While Kat worked the grill, the rest of the Bates family prepared the side dishes and set the table. Camilla, who had been ordered to sit down and relax, looked restless with nothing to do.

Eventually, Jacob took pity and sat down with her to talk in length about how he made and decorated the tableware they were about to use. Camilla appeared to be engrossed in the conversation but Elsie couldn't tell if it was out of genuine interest or she was just being polite. While her dad could be relatively quiet compared to her mom, Elsie knew that if a topic interested him enough, Jacob could talk about it for hours to anyone. Fortunately, he had the sense to stop once the food was ready, and after waiting for Elsie to take pictures of the spread for social media, much to Bev's annoyance, they sat down to eat.

Meals were one of the few times when the chatter in the Bates's household was light, but only because everyone was too busy eating. They still managed to get a lot of catching-up done, but they tended to take turns speaking instead of all of them offering their input at once. Bev went first and gave updates on how her classes were going, and Nate followed with the outcomes of some of his latest cases. Their recaps were short and mainly meant for Elsie since she was the most out of the loop, and the others ended up throwing in details that were missed from the first tellings.

When it was Elsie's turn, she started off by recounting the earlier parts of the Games. While she had given her parents a brief summary before, there were a lot of details she had left out due to time, so everyone was listening intently to her every word. Occasionally, they would ask Camilla to corroborate Elsie's claims ("Was there really a Games-themed cafe that served food with guardians' faces on them?"), and she was quick to offer her own perspective ("I saw pictures of it, but I didn't go myself.").

Things got touchy when Elsie's story began to approach the attack. In the weeks following the incident, she had done extraordinarily well in thinking about it as little as possible. In retrospect, she probably should have thought about it more when she had spent all that time by herself in her condo just so she would be mentally prepared for this moment.

"And you guys know the rest, right?" Elsie tried to casually tie off her story without being too obvious.

"No, we don't," Nate said unsympathetically, not at all buying Elsie's redirect.

"You can't just leave us at a cliffhanger like that," Bev protested. "Why do you think I've been staying quiet and listening to you ramble for so long? I need details on the important stuff, not about the team uniforms!"

"Beverly," Kat warned, before turning back to Elsie. "You can tell us, right?"

Legally, she could. About a week ago, the Org had notified her that she was allowed to go public with her personal experiences about the attack. She just didn't want to. But if Elsie said that, then her family would worry about her, and she didn't want that either.

Elsie didn't think she had hesitated for long enough for it to be noticeable, but she must have done something to make her reluctance known because Camilla stepped in.

"May I...?" she offered, asking both Elsie and her family.

Apparently, Elsie's family didn't care who told the story as long as someone did, and they immediately turned their attention towards Camilla, forgetting about the oldest Bates daughter. Camilla, on the other hand, was looking at Elsie.

"I got it," she said simply.

Elsie didn't know exactly what Camilla meant by that, so she chose to interpret it how she liked. And when Camilla turned to her family to delve into the details of the attack and the aftermath, Elsie feigned attention and determinedly tuned them out. Thankfully, her family was hanging on to every one of Camilla's words, and they didn't say anything that Elsie needed to pay attention to until Camilla was done.