That Night

For the rest of the night, I continued to act as if everything was normal. I was trying desperately not to think about what Mary had told me about Rose's...hormones...but it was a difficult concept to get out of my head.

Eventually, instead of trying to block it out entirely, I started trying to think about the positives. Now that our daughter was in her mother's body, perhaps that would help her calm down - my wife and I have a healthy sex-life, but she has her hormones well and truly under control. Hopefully that would help Rose establish a bit more control over herself.

Rose had clearly tried to imitate her mother's makeup that morning, but she'd gone a bit overboard. A part of me wondered if anyone at her office had noticed - Mary works in customer relations, so (without being disrespectful to my wife's work) I was sure that Rose could bluff her way through her mother's job for a few weeks; it didn't require any particular technical knowledge, and our daughter has a good head on her shoulders.

And a body filled with hormones, it turned out.

After "the kids" had gone to bed, Rose and I chatted for a while - she asked a lot of questions about her own job, and I answered them as if nothing was odd about her asking if I knew where she kept her phone codes. I didn't bring up our daughter's truancy or rebellion problems: we had two weeks, and I wanted to be subtle.

We went to our separate rooms, and after an hour of laying awake and staring at the ceiling, I eventually drifted into a dreamless sleep.