It would have taken a particularly oblivious brick to miss the shift in Lauren's attitude.[color=2E2C2C] And Amy may have been built like a house made of them, but she sure as hell wasn't quite that dull.[/color]

Her hand twitched at her side.

In all of her expectations for how Parent's Day would go, she'd somehow forgotten to plan for this particular eventuality. She'd thought one of the sets of parents coming might not have liked one of them--hell, she was fairly certain most of them wouldn't approved of her at first or Lauren after seeing her antics--but that would have been easy to deal with. Survive the day, let everything return to equilibrium as soon as they left. Parental opinions be damned.

What she hadn't expected was that their presence would cause some kind of break in Bastille itself, not through any fault of their own but through something one of her teammates said.

...For heaven's sake, she was wearing Costa's daughter's [i]jacket[/i].

And it hurt, for what it was worth. Not deep, but just a dull ache of knowing it'd take a bit to get back to how things had been. Ben was her oldest friend in this new life and Lauren was... Lauren. And she couldn't do anything about it, not right now. Not with her mother around, not while it still felt like something she was watching rather than something she was involved in.

Things would go back to normal, though. After a while. 

She walked quickly to catch up with Ben and Lauren. For the moment, she had a somewhat self-involved but definitely critical and pressing concern.

[color=E52B50]"Um..."[/color] There was a long pause as she thought, then decided to push through. She'd already used it once, she may as well try it again. [color=E52B50]"Lorena? Is your father as... Accepting as Costa is or should I be concerned that your jacket is going to get flayed off of me?"[/color]