She leaned in close to him, her shoulder brushing up against his as he opened the Syrrah. “You have such strong hands,” she said.

I watched as he raised an eyebrow. No one else was paying attention. They were too drunk. Then he said, “I can do a lot with these hands.”

“I bet you can.”

A few weeks later she told me she’d fallen for him. She grabbed my hands at dinner, like she had something incredibly important to say, and admitted she was in love with her editor’s husband. “I feel terrible. So terrible. But yet, he’s the first man I’ve truly fallen in love with since your father so long ago.”

“That’s great, Barb. But he’s married, you know. Maybe you want to look elsewhere?”

She didn’t look elsewhere and their affair continued into the fall. Every time I saw her, she’d drop a new detail. The necklace he bought for her in Soho, the dirty text message he sent the night before, the multiple orgasms he gave her while pounding her on the table. You know, the usual details any daughter wants to hear from her mom.

As they became more entwined, they grew increasingly careless, and soon Miranda started to become suspicious.

One morning while my mom was still fast asleep I dropped by to grab a book I’d left behind. I heard Phil pad out of the bedroom to make a call. He rarely spent the night, but Miranda was in London for business so he was free to come and go. Or so he thought.

“Hi darling,” he said quietly into the phone.

Pause.

“Oh, I’m just getting up and making some coffee.”

Pause.

“I didn’t hear the home phone ring.”

Pause.

“Five times? You called five times. I took a really long shower.”

Pause.

“Sometimes I shower before I make coffee. You know that’s true, darling. Anyway, how are you? How is London? I miss you so very much,” he said.

Idiot, I thought.

He was trying to nip it in the bud, allay her fears. But women are smart and Miranda is one of the smartest of all. Her hackles were raised and she wasn’t going to lower them on account of a shower-before-I-make-coffee cover-up from her philandering husband.

I tried to warn my mom. I tried to let her know she might want to cool it with him. But she would hear none of it. She was madly in love and nothing was going to stop her. Not even the private detective I spotted outside her building the next morning, leaning ever so casually against the building across the street. He held a blue cardboard coffee cup from the bodega around the corner and the New York Daily News, which he pretended to read. He had a mustache, naturally. I even nodded at him. He pretended not to notice and looked away.

As I walked to the subway that November morning, crunching on the last fallen leaves of the season, I counted off the things I knew for sure about the situation.

I knew my mom was going to get caught.

I knew I could prevent her from getting caught.

I also knew I didn’t want her to get caught. She depended on Miranda. She needed Miranda. She revered Miranda. As much as my mom made me crazy, she was still my mom and I would take a bullet for her.

I stayed at her house the next night, rose early, dressed in my sexiest schoolgirl costume, and timed my exit from the house to line up with his morning escape.

I walked out with Phil, chatted with him, linked my arm through his, and smiled flirtatiously at him. He probably thought it odd that his lover’s teenage daughter was being overly friendly. When we reached the corner of Central Park West, out of view of my mom, I grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him in for a long, hungry kiss.

I was going for broke. I had no clue if he’d push me away. All I knew was that cameras were snapping our picture, so I hoped to hell he’d like the way I kissed.

He did.

He liked it a lot. He kissed me back hard, twining his hands in my hair like I was his new lover.

I detested every single nanosecond of that kiss with Phil. I loathed everything about him. The way he turned on Miranda. The way he turned on my mom.

But I didn’t let on. I knew how to pretend. I pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell her. We’ll do this again tomorrow,” I said.

“Come to my office later today. I can’t wait that long.”

“Of course,” I said, figuring more cold, hard evidence would only help. The private detectives followed me that afternoon as I walked into his building, rode up in the elevator, and visited him for a make-out session that necessitated the longest shower I ever took in my life. I needed to wash off his disgusting.

But I sucked it up. I took one for the team. I led him into the trap he didn’t know was being set.

What I didn’t bargain on was that Miranda would have her guys keep following me. That’s how she learned about all the other men Layla had lined up.

My mom shakes her head in denial, shock taking over. Her eyes are wide and glassy, and she can’t speak at first.

Then the smoke detector buzzes, a sharp bleeping directly above us. The risotto has charred. I grab a potholder, remove it from the heat and turn off the stove.

“Miranda was on to you. Miranda knew Phil was having an affair. She had private detectives outside the house. She was going to bust you. And I didn’t want you to get caught. So I took him from you. That’s why he stopped seeing you, Barb. Because he was busted. Because I walked into her trap. On purpose. I got caught for you. I did it so she would never know you were the one screwing her husband,” I say as I toss the potholder on the counter.

She parts her lips to speak but no words come out.

“That’s why I’m writing the book. Because she kept following me. Because she figured out that I was a working girl, and then she blackmailed me into writing the memoirs, and she told me if I didn’t do it she’d tell you everything. So now you know everything. You know I’m a whore, and a liar, and I kissed Phil, and even made out with him to make sure the evidence pointed to me, not you. And you also know I saved your ass and she has no clue you were involved. That the great Barb Coleman who sends scumbags to jail could turn around and do something shady herself. And she never has to know. Because I’m the pig in shit. Right, mom?”

She gasps, then sinks down to the kitchen tiles, hanging in a low crouch before she flops to the floor, completely supine, one hundred percent horizontal. This is her rock bottom, right? This is when she’ll say she’s sorry. When she’ll thank me in some weird way for saving her.

But that’s not what she does.

“I can’t believe you kissed my Phil,” she moans. “I can’t believe you’re a whore. How could you do this to me?”

I blink twice, shocked that this is the part that bothers her most. That I did this to her.

But I don’t have a chance to answer because someone knocks on the door. My mom doesn’t make a move to get it.

“Do you want me to answer it?”

She waves a hand in the air like she can’t handle the question. The decision is up to me. I walk to door and look through the peephole.

“It’s Neil.”

She snaps her head up. “Don’t go near him. Don’t you even think about going near him,” she says and stands.

Well, I guess that settles that. I am officially the Coleman slut and I can’t be trusted with her boyfriends.

“He’s all yours, mother.” I grab the handle and yank open the door.

I run to the park nearby, sink down onto the first bench I see, grab my notebook from my purse, and turn to a blank page after the story of the dogs in the snowy moonlight.

I write words that are more awful than any I wrote for Miranda.

I am nineteen years old, I have kissed twenty-four guys, and my mother thinks I’m a whore.

Chapter Twenty

Trey

I scan her block again.