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MS: Mom?

The producer wants to talk about trust?

Fine.

If I had to pick which of my parents I trust more, I wouldn’t pick Mom.

Why would I? Dad refused to fuck me over in that courtroom. He had every chance to set the record straight, tell the judge and jury the real extent of my involvement, and he didn’t. He changed his story to fit mine. He may be a monster, and he’ll resent me for the rest of his life, but I’m still his child.

But Mom publicly called me a liar until the moment the cops plugged in that hard drive. When she picked me up from the police station after I put William Campbell in the hospital, she screamed and beat the steering wheel and told me I was just like my father. She hates having to feed and clothe me unless it’s for the camera, and my existence only isn’t a burden when she’s getting social media partnership payouts for her Hashtag Autism Mom videos.

I can’t get over the way my voice cracked when I said it: Mom? Like a little kid.

When Daniel and the producer head off to review the footage—Daniel leaving me with a sympathetic wince and a whispered promise that, yeah, absolutely, he’ll pick me up if I need to get out of this nightmare of a house—Mom heads to the kitchen for the rest of her wine. She leans on the butcher block kitchen island with her third drink and a beleaguered sigh, as if she’s not the one that signed us up for this.

I stand a few feet away, trying to figure out what angle to approach this from.

“Can I help you?” Mom snaps when I have officially lingered in the kitchen too long.

“I—”

“If you’re here to tell me how bad of a mother I am,” Mom says, “I don’t want to hear it.”

I mentally rewind through the interview, trying to pinpoint whatever I said that brought this on.

“Okay?” I say. “That’s literally not even—”

“Oh, don’t bullshit me.” For a second I think she might be deigning to face me, but turns out she’s fetching the bottle again. Four glasses, start counting. I might drink too much for my age, but at least I don’t have a problem. Mom and Warren Hanover have problems. “That’s the only thing you ever think about me, I get it. I’m sorry that I’m the worst mother in the world.”

Well, if she wanted me to think of her as a better parent, she should’ve been one. I open my mouth to snap back at her, but she steamrolls right over me.

“Nobody else agrees with you, by the way,” she says. “Instagram and Facebook, all my friends, they agree with me. They think I’m a good mom. They understand everything I do for you, even if you don’t.”

I wrangle all my anger into a lazy shrug. If I stay nonchalant, there’s a chance this won’t turn into a whole thing. “I wanted to tell you I changed my mind about going to East Early, but fine, if you’re going to be like this—”

Mom’s head jerks up. “What?”

I open the fridge to find something to eat that won’t send her on a tirade about how I have such a nice figure and shouldn’t want to ruin it. Maybe one of these little yogurts.

“Morgan,” Mom says. “What did you say?”

“I want to go to East Early.”

“For filming?”

“Obviously.”

I crack the yogurt cup off the pack, hip-check the fridge closed, and peel off the lid.

“I thought you didn’t want to go,” she says.

“I told you, I changed my mind.”

She mulls over the proposed adjustment hard enough it makes her nose wrinkle. Probably trying to figure out why I reversed course, what’s in it for me that she wants to cut off at the pass, et cetera. But apparently she can’t come up with any good reason to say no.

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll let Greg know.”

I pull a spoon from the silverware drawer to scrape yogurt off the lid and stick it in my mouth. “Cool.”