"NICE LAYUP, SAMMY!" Carl bellowed.

"Yay, Sammy!" Bobby yelled next to him, throwing her hands in the air.

The cheering was going great tonight. Sammy was putting all her time practicing layups and close shots to use, and her defensive hustle seemed to be unbeatable—in part due to how she was so much taller than nearly every other person on the court.

Carl held his hand out and got a high five from his youngest daughter as they both sat down again. Bobby had never been interested in running around as much as her ever-rambunctious older sister, but she still looked up to Sammy and came to her basketball games without needing to be dragged out of the house.

As it should be. Annie had spent a lot of time when the girls were younger worrying that they might grow up to have a dysfunctional relationship like she and Rebecca had, but Carl had taken precautions to help reassure her. He'd ensured that he always spent roughly equal time playing with the girls when they were little, even keeping timesheets for it until Sammy had grown old enough to ask why he sometimes referred to the end of their playtime as Clocking Out. So adorable!

At least, she had been until she went to her mom with the same question, at which point Carl had once again needed to launch into a technical explanation while Annie pressed her hands to her temples.

Presently, however, Annie was sitting on his left and being oddly quiet considering how well Sammy had been playing.

Carl put his arm around her shoulder, and she sank into his side. He leaned his head down towards her a little. "You okay?"

She nodded against his chest but made no effort to speak.

He stroked his fingers along her upper arm, feeling like maybe she just needed a good hug for now. It wouldn't be the first time, and he knew better than to start asking more questions.

Instead, he eavesdropped on Bobby, who was enthusiastically explaining to Aunt Becca about the zombie empress that her guild was going to be raiding on Friday. Good, wholesome conversation from the sound of it. Rebecca might be a bit aggravating when it came to Annie or him, but she was a pretty cool aunt most of the time, even if she did spoil the girls a bit.

Carl kept a close eye on Annie for the rest of the game. In between sessions of cheering, obviously, and some chats with Bobby about this and that, during which he learned that the keyword to view in-game character stats was apparently "Status", which he was pretty sure he must have said at one point or another, and sure, he could've looked it up himself, but he'd been pretty busy, and having more things to talk about with his daughters was never a bad thing, and also it felt like as soon as he began doing any form of research about in-game stuff then he was playing the game instead of just using it to relax for a… A few minutes… Just a short while at lunch…

Once again, Carl explicitly did not think about how that sort of thing was possible since it seemed like something that would ruin his lunchtime outings, which were pretty disturbing in a lot of ways now that he thought about them. How could the company really be so hands-off about in-game conduct?

He'd done a little research, at the least, and the content filtering seemed very above-board. If a player had the account-wide parental filter enabled—as Bobby did, of course, since Annie was never one to miss details, and he'd double-checked—they were, regardless of age, unable to even set foot in any of the more explicit zones such as that crazy expansion starter city that Carl had recently been to. It similarly prevented a person from perceiving any implied content that might be deemed mature, which was a step further than even the regular content filter which he'd disabled after it blocked him from seeing parts of fish that he caught. Lastly, it would take action on anyone attempting to display explicit content to someone who had the parental filter enabled—which was apparently displayed somewhere in the in-game UI for those players—and warp the offending player either back to their point of recall if it wasn't in the same zone, the most distant safe zone that they had visited, or, if those weren't possible, suspending the person's account for a day. Even the lesser, non-parental version of the filter had functionality with the same results if it deemed that a player was being harassed in certain ways, which seemed to be the reason it had won awards for its innovation.

For players who didn't have any filtering enabled, however… There had been some kind of disclaimer notice that Carl had ignored when disabling the filter for his work account. It seemed absurd that such a flimsy waiver was enough to prevent the company from getting sued into oblivion, but he wasn't a lawyer, and he wasn't that interested. Well, he was a little interested, since Mina was apparently playing with the mature content expansion and had disabled the filtering for some reason, even though she really seemed like the type of person who should probably have it enabled. Maybe he should… No, she probably had a reason for all that, and he didn't want to stress her out further.

And speaking of further, he hadn't forgotten that he'd been meaning to check up on why the company had so many lawyers, either, which was something he'd always vaguely wondered about but never cared enough to investigate. Apparently their CLO, Rosie Farrow, was some sort of legal genius as well as being aggressively Libertarian, and in the time that the company had spent developing the game, she'd been hard at work devising a system—Conflict Resolution—in which the company could offer its players the same near-total freedom that they had in real life along with the same consequences; pressing real life charges against someone for the more serious, disturbing types of crimes—the very ones he'd seemed to be running into—committed in a game had never been easier, and the company's Data Management department was tasked exclusively with storing all the game's action and brain link logs indefinitely in order to be able to cooperate fully with any lawsuits.

All these thoughts had gotten Carl a bit distracted, so much so that he'd nearly missed his cue to rise up and cheer when Sammy turned a rebound into a fast break that ended with more points scored for her team. He made focusing again on his family a top task from that point on, but he was still unable to figure out why Annie seemed so subdued. They'd been together for a long time now, but it wasn't like he always knew what she was thinking.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Maybe it was…

Yeah, that was probably it. Something happened at school with one of her students, and she was depressed again because she couldn't do more for them like she always wanted to. It happened often enough, and she behaved similarly on those occasions. But she kept giving him such odd looks…

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"Hanna and I went to get sandwiches, and she gave me a big pep talk because I was still nervous," Sammy said excitedly, still exulting in her team's dominant victory after her second game as a starter. "Then we got back, and it sorta just clicked."

"You played really well, Sammy," Annie said again from the front seat, her earlier unease gone now while they drove home. "All that practice is paying off."

"You've been practicing a lot?" asked Rebecca, sitting on the opposite end of the backseat from the giant sixteen year-old.

"Yup!" Sammy called back. "I went to a basketball camp over the summer, and Dad's been helping me with my layups when it's not basketball season."

"You're out there like, every second when you're home," Bobby said. "I don't get how you're not bored."

"Can't get bored of winning!" Sammy said.

Carl nodded to himself. Sammy had really managed to focus herself on improving her basketball skills over the past six months. What had started as games of horse when she was younger had evolved into acting as a blocker while she practiced her layups and then posing very carefully as a defender while she tried to get rebounds off the backboard of the hoop in their driveway. Not that he was necessarily great at basketball, but he did have a few inches on her as well as considerable mass advantage, which forced her to acquire the skills and technique which made her an impassable wall to shorter players on—

"You were driving the lane well, too," Rebecca said in a too-innocent tone. "Too bad you can't drive still."

Annie sighed, clearly in annoyance.

Carl rolled his eyes. The topic had been raised so many times by now, both before and after Sammy's sixteenth birthday the previous month, that it was effectively a dead subject. Annie didn't have a strong opinion on whether it was too early for her eldest daughter to drive, but he did, and she was just too young, darn it. His car—the one he'd start her off with obviously, since it had the best safety features of anything on the road—might be nearly a hundred percent safe, but there was still that one percent chance…

He frowned as the words of another father came back to him. How long would he keep babying her for? She was legally old enough to drive once she got her license, which in itself would take a while, so wasn't it a little too overprotective of him to keep saying she had to wait?

Wait for what, exactly? Cars would never be a hundred percent safe. That was just common sense. But there was no longer a possibility of operator error in autonomous vehicles, which went a long way towards improving safety. Waiting another year or two wasn't going to change anything there, but it might be long enough to…

Carl's frown deepened. A year or two might be long enough that he was no longer the best dad! He'd read all about these types of pivotal events in the formative years of children, and it was possible for children to develop long-lasting resentment over such things. Seth'tith had been right! How was Sammy gonna grow up if he didn't let her grow up?

He let out a breath and nodded, a plan already settling into his mind. She was still kinda young to be driving around wherever she wanted, but just meant there had to be rules. Annie was great at coming up with rules.

Rules for the kids, that is. Annie had never explicitly told him he couldn't do anything, of course. She'd given him a choice all those years ago, and he'd chosen her, but she'd never gloated about it, nor had she said he couldn't ever do those things again. It had been Carl who decided to give them up and become a better version of himself. When he'd told her he stopped talking to all his old online friends, she'd given him a puzzled look and said she'd only meant to say goodbye because he wouldn't be playing with them anymore; it had been his decision to cut off contact, imagining that they wouldn't want to talk to him after how abruptly he'd shucked his guild responsibilities and quit the game. So, too, had she never implied that she wanted him to stop talking to Max, or Tim, or Alec; those friendships had dwindled due to all of them growing ever-busier with the trials that growing older brought.

Annie was the best. That was just a fact. That's why when he patted her leg and gave her the Let's Talk About This look, she naturally responded with an affirmative nod, because…

Except she didn't, and she was giving him that look again, which was like, part…confusion? Or something. He still couldn't place it.

Carl shot his wife the I'm Gonna Need You To Repeat That look, feeling that he'd missed something.

She started, then gave the nod he'd been expecting, rubbing a hand to her forehead. Whatever was going on at school must really be bothering her, but she didn't seem to want to talk about it yet, and he still wasn't going to force it. His wife wasn't the type to need him to hold her hand all the time, or even most of the time, which was one of the many things he loved about her.

With that said, he'd been taking point on the issue of Sammy's driver's license, so it was his responsibility now to lift the smothering blanket of silence that had descended on the previous exuberance of the car's interior.

"We'll talk about it," Carl said. It wasn't a grand statement; no, if anything it—

Sammy squealed in excitement and hugged the nearest person, which happened to be Bobby.