So we’re done with the niceties. The food has been offered, the greetings dispensed, and now we get down to business.

I gulp, vaguely aware that I’m shaking. I try to collect myself, to draw on the same strength I felt with Joanne, the same courage I found when I told Kristen my truths, and the same well I tapped into this morning with Trey.

She places the spoon in a silver holder, turns down the heat on the stove, and then clasps her hands, steepling her fingers together. This is Barb Coleman The Cleaner. This is the woman who confronts seedy politicians. This is the lady who will tear a lying scumbag to pieces with her pen that has the teeth of a shark.

I am in her crosshairs for the first time.

“I have sources everywhere, Harley Coleman.” Her voice is cold and cruel. “And that includes at my publishing house. And an assistant editor told me about a certain anonymously penned Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict,” she says bitterly as if the title is vinegar on her tongue. “She thought I would find them particularly interesting given my credentials in investigating call girls and sex trafficking.”

I say nothing, but I don’t need to speak because Barb Coleman is on her high and mighty soapbox.

“So the assistant showed me some of the pages she’d received for production. Naturally names had been changed, and she didn’t know who the author was. Who this poor young teenage girl was. She thought I might be interested in looking into who’d written them, and if there was any sort of foul play involved.”

I dig my nails into my fists, relying on my old tricks when I felt tempted. Now I need them to stay grounded. To make it through the inquisition alive.

“I didn’t know who the girl was either at first. I didn’t know who the girl could be who told tawdry tales to clients of masturbating in lingerie. Or who informed a poorly-endowed man that he had a big penis. And I wasn’t sure at all who this girl was who led one of her clients around on a leash,” she says in her perfectly enunciated speech, sounding like a lawyer cross-examining a reluctant witness she’s about to corner in the lie. “But then I saw other parts. Sections about how her mother had tied a red ribbon in her hair. Stories about running into her mother’s lover in the hallway. And then came the piece de resistance. The story of the carnival.”

I try to shrink into the wall, willing myself to become dust and vapor.

My mother narrows her eyes, breathes through her nostrils. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know that was you?”

My jaw drops. This is what she has to say? I stumble through an answer, saying the first thing that comes to mind. “It never occurred to me you’d see it.”

“So it was you? You’re Layla.”

I could lie. I could try to spin a new tall tale. But what’s the point? I’m at the end of the rope, and it’s time she saw that I’m not beautiful. That I am ugly too. “Yes. I am Layla. I was a teenage call girl.”

It’s as if I slapped her. She raises her hands in the air, gesturing wildly as her tirade comes tumbling down.

“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve gone through. After the way your father left me. After all I’ve done to expose this kind of horridness. There are girls all over the world who are forced, coerced, raped and brutalized to become prostitutes.” Her crispness falls away and her voice begins to break. But the tears that start flowing are tears of her own self-righteousness. Because I have made a hypocrite of the great Barb Coleman. “And I have fought and searched and investigated and done everything to expose that kind of crime. And to learn you willingly walked into it? You chose this life. You enjoyed it. You wanted it. You rolled around in it like a pig in shit.”

With that, she might as well have slammed a fist inside me, jamming hard on my guts.

The pain spills through every corner of my body. I am punched, beaten and torn into a million pieces with those awful words. I am shaking and sobbing as tears rain down my cheeks. I cover my face with my hands so she can’t see me. My whole body is wracked, and my heart, my lungs, my stomach, my spleen, every single part of me is quivering and twisting in on itself. Weeds are crawling up inside me, pulling, tugging, ripping, and turning my body into the dark shameful thing it is.

I feel her hand on me. Angrily peeling my fingers away from my face. She is so much stronger than me. She always has been.

“You have no right to cry,” she tells me, practically smearing the words on me through her own sanctimonious, superior tears. “What you did was disgusting.” She grips my chin, forces me to look at her. “And I don’t know how to ever forgive you.”

Another blow to the chest.

“Forgive me? You have to forgive me? I did it for you,” I shout.

“Oh! Don’t even go there. I’ve heard every backpedaling cover-up there ever was. There is nothing you can tell me that will make what you did okay. I’d be damn curious though how you were caught. Which one of your clients had something on you?”

“That’s what you think happened?”

She crosses her arms over her chest and nods, her eyes narrowed to slits. I can feel the fury building inside her. The storm clouds are growing darker, swirling closer. “That’s always how it happens.” Then like a hiss, she adds, “Layla.”

As if it burns her tongue.

Oh fine. She wants to play it like this, then I will roll up my pig-in-shit sleeves and fight harder. “You want to know?” I spit back at her. “You really want to know?”

“Sure. Try me.”

“Here’s your tip, The Cleaner,” I say, holding my hands out wide, taunting her. “Miranda is my editor too. That make things a bit clearer?”

She raises her eyebrows. She’s not putting two and two together yet. “Miranda? My Miranda? My editor? The woman who edits my articles and publishes my books? How is that even possible?”

“Yes. Mom. Your editor. Your Miranda. And what else do you share with Miranda?” I toss out, wagging my fingers in a come-and-get-it gesture. “It’s not that difficult. See if you can connect the dots.”

She clasps her hand over her mouth. “No,” she croaks. “Please tell me this has nothing to do with Phil.”

I nod, clenching my teeth. Then the tables are turned and I deliver the punishing blow. “It has everything to do with her husband, Phil. The man you were fucking. The man you had an affair with. The affair you told me every dirty, sordid detail like you thought I wanted to know how he liked it with you. That he liked to take you rough. That he’d bend you over the kitchen table. That he pulled your hair. You screwed your editor’s husband, and you thought you were smarter than her. You thought she’d never know because you were in love with him and because you knew how to cover your tracks. But guess what? She found out. And I saved your ass from her.”

My mom’s affair with Phil began last summer. I pegged it instantly.

Phil and Miranda were over for dinner along with a big group of publishing types. My mom’s agent, her agent’s assistant, publicists from the house and on and on.

The living room was abuzz with music, James Taylor or some other seventies singer type that all the adults loved. So much wine was in the air you practically smell the grapes. Drained bottles of reds and whites lined the dining room table and kitchen counter. Miranda was drunk already. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to keep them open, slumping down in a chair at the dining room table.

As I checked to see if I had any texts from Cam about a job, my mother sailed into the kitchen to open another bottle.

A Syrrah, she proclaimed.

“Let me help you, Barb,” Phil said. He stood up from the table and joined her, reaching for the bottle, placing both his hands on top of my mother’s.

“Why thank you, Phil,” she purred and they locked eyes.