Xan pretty well won over the readers here, and I hope this also finally buried the last of the “she’s just doing it for the moneyyy” sentiment about Shanna. I hope, likewise, that you can tolerate my griping about that interpretation, since it partially inspired this scene, and my/Shanna’s defensiveness probably gave it some extra juice. (She’s kinda beating Xan over the head with her moral superiority here, but that’s a vice I’m comfortable admitting she has.) It’s important to turn all your feelings to constructive purposes when composing fiction.

Mrs. Ackerton is the mother of the woman who plays, and in some senses has become, Frigg Akerfeldt.

ICYMI, Shanna asks for Xan’s phone instead of using her own because she’s pretty sure somebody’s after her (not necessarily a single hitman… could be a squad, or cops, or an Anonymous-like collective of hardcore users). She’s already using burners, but the more conservative she is with her own phones’ use, the fewer phones she has to go through. It’s not like she can use her old credit cards to buy new ones without possibly revealing her location… she’d have to pay cash, and carrying cash carries its own risks… dodging the grid is hard. Xan, at least, probably has a reliable method to cloak his own phone’s use, considering how nonchalantly he hands it over.