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"It's not a disaster," he said automatically.<br />
"Did you follow me from the party?"<br />
"Yes."<br />
"I didn't even know you were there." His dark clothes indicated he must have been on guardian<br />
duty at the party. "So you saw the illustrious Janine cause a commotion by dragging me out."<br />
"It wasn't a commotion. Hardly anyone noticed. I saw because I was watching you."<br />
I refused to let myself get excited over that. "That's not what she said," I told him. "I might as<br />
well have been working a corner as far as she was concerned."<br />
I relayed the conversation from the hallway.<br />
"She's just worried about you," Dimitri said when I finished.<br />
"She overreacted."<br />
"Sometimes mothers are overprotective."<br />
I stared at him. "Yeah, but this is my mother. And she didn't seem that protective, really. I think<br />
she was more worried I'd embarrass her or something. And all that becoming-a-mother-tooyoung<br />
stuff was stupid. I'm not going to do anything like that."<br />
"Maybe she wasn't talking about you," he said.<br />
More silence. My jaw fell open.<br />
You don't have the life experience for it—you haven't even lived your own life yet. You won't be<br />
able to do the kind of job you wish you could.<br />
My mom had been twenty when I was born. Growing up, that had always seemed really old to<br />
me. But now…that was only a few years off for me. Not old at all. Did she think she'd had me<br />
too soon? Had she done a shoddy job raising me simply because she didn't know any better at<br />
the time? Did she regret the way things had turned out between us? And was it… was it maybe<br />
possible that she'd had some personal experience of her own with Moroi men and people
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