Food for Thought
Once the men's laundry was in the wash, Amanda realized she'd need to run to the store for groceries. She hadn't planned on feeding a small army while her family was out of town. The men would probably appreciate a more substantial meal than the simple salad and sandwich fixings she had on hand. Something quick and easy like a chicken stir-fry over rice sounded good, with a big salad since Francine had mentioned maxing her carbs for the day with their ham and egg bagels earlier.
She'd never imagined Francine having to put much effort into maintaining her fabulous figure. She herself had to work to keep weight on. After Lee die...disappeared, she'd become alarmingly skeletal, dropping over 20 pounds from her naturally slender frame. She was still working on regaining the weight.
It suddenly occurred to her that all those comfort foods Francine had shared with her before she was transferred to New York because "I couldn't possibly eat all of it" may simply have been a subtle effort to keep forcing calories into her. Amanda had figured out long ago that Francine actually did care about her as well as Lee, but she had her own mostly indirect ways of showing it. Expressing the softer emotions was never Francine's strong suit.
That was understandable. Emotions could be a huge liability in this business, and Francine was not a fan of liabilities. She'd eventually confided to Amanda that her father had spent years in special forces, then military intelligence before going to work for the State Department, and that her near insolence and competitive nature had been hammered into her since she was a very little girl. She and Lee were a lot alike in that respect, and in their upbringing. Lee wasn't as good at overriding his emotions once he'd allowed them to develop, and he had a protective nature that Francine in most cases lacked. In most cases. Lee and Billy Melrose had always been the exceptions to the more uninviting parts of Francine's personality.
Amanda had often thought that her life would have been very different if Lee hadn't still been reeling from his partner Erik's death when they met. His fresh survivor guilt over that operation had made him more aware of the danger he'd put her in, and at the time he simply couldn't have handled having an innocent death on his hands. It had taken him years to realize that he'd been courting his own demise back then, taking unnecessary risks, and leaving a wide path of destruction in his dating life.
It had also taken both women years to realize that most of Francine's initial animosity came from both her horror of liabilities and a deep awareness of how badly Lee needed to be saved from himself at the time, especially where women were concerned. It had never been about Amanda personally, at all. Except maybe where fashion was involved, although part of that stemmed from an awareness that Lee's real weakness wasn't the sophisticated seductress type, but the unpretentiously pretty ones. That drab, mousy little KGB witch Eva What's-her-name was the prime near-disastrous example. Francine had actually been happy for him and swore never to make that mistake again. Like most men, he was an idiot when it came to women. She herself had attracted his unwanted attention with the pretty skirt and sweater sets she'd favored when she came to The Agency. Nobody ever understood why she spent the next few years trying to be aggressively fashionable and sophisticated. There were worse things than being perceived as a snarky snob.
Looking back, the 80s had not been kind to any of them where fashion was concerned.
The turning point had come when they each finally understood that they were both deeply committed to looking out for Lee. That was also the operation that made them realize they were capable of working pretty well together, even if it took several more years for Francine to allow a rare actual friendship to develop.