“I’m okay, hon,” I said, gesturing for him to put me down.

He did so slowly, then steadied me until I had my footing. “I’m not leaving you alone with her, so don’t even think about it.”

“Reyes, it’s okay. She didn’t mean to slap the living shit out of me.” I said the last bit while leveling my own glare on her.

She had the decency to look embarrassed.

“It’s not her I’m worried about. Is that what you were doing in the field with Angel?”

He hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

He was lying. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I raised my chin and turned from him. After a moment, he left.

Then I turned on the woman who’d made my life hell growing up. “What are you still doing here?”

“I wanted to explain.”

“Charley,” Gemma said, “if you’ll just hear her out, I think it would be good for both of you.”

“Why? She has never listened to me. Why should I have to listen to her? I should mark her soul for Osh. Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one.”

“I don’t have one?” she said from between gritted teeth.

There she was. I knew the helpful, nurturing routine wouldn’t last long.

“You think I’m a big joke,” she said, her face the picture of rage.

“Hon, you’re not a joke. You’re the punch line.”

“You didn’t even go to your own father’s funeral.”

Gemma gasped.

“You’ve been holed up in here for months like you’re in witness protection or something.”

“The only one I need protection from is you.”

“That’s it! Sit down! Both of you.”

Denise sat on the bench at the end of the bed, while I crossed my arms over my chest again, showing just how defiant I could be.

Gemma reached over, grabbed my ear, and led me to the chair in the corner of our tiny room. “Ow, holy cow, Gem! Katherine the Midwife is not going to be happy with you.”

“Her name is just Katherine. You have to stop calling her Katherine the Midwife.”

She let go and I rubbed my abused cartilage. “How did you do that?”

“Sit down!”

“No, really. I’m having a kid. I need to know how to completely incapacitate someone by grabbing their ear.”

“Sit down.”

I sat down. “So, you’ll tell me later?”

“You need to listen to what Mom has to say.”

“No, I don’t.”

“She deserves that much, Charley.”

“Wait, you were there. Right there through our entire childhood. You saw it. You saw what she put me through. And might I bring up the slap I just received.”

It was the second time in my life Denise had slapped me in front of a crowd, and it was just as jolting and humiliating as the first time.

“I saw you both going at each other like children on a playground our whole lives.”

“Yeah, but she always started it.”

“That’s not what I saw.”

“What about the time she dragged me off my bike in front of all the neighbor kids because I didn’t do the dishes? Or the time a boy threw dirt in my face, right in my face, and she turned away, refused to do anything about it? Or the time she tried to run me down with her car?”

Denise sucked in a sharp breath. “I never tried to run you over with my car.”

“Oh, right, I just made that one up. But you admit to the other things.”

“Charley, oh my God,” Gemma said. “Can we stick with nonfiction here?”

“What? I needed backup just in case you didn’t find the other events horrific enough. I know what I’m saying seems childish and ridiculous for me to be holding a grudge for so long, but she was like that every day of my life. In everything that I did. She never complimented me. She never took up for me. She never stopped nagging me about the stupidest things. It was like she made it her personal mission to make sure I knew I was less than she was. Mothers don’t tear down, Gemma. They build up. Like she did with you.”

“That’s not true, Charley,” Gemma said in her psychiatrist voice.

“She slapped me in front of all those people. I was five years old.”

“Charley, look at that from her perspective. It was a horrible situation. You told a woman whose daughter had been missing for weeks that her daughter was in front of her.”

“She was.”

“We’re mere mortals, Charley. We didn’t know that. Mom was mortified. She was horrified and she panicked.”

“Like a few minutes ago?” I rubbed my cheek. She had the decency to look ashamed. “Were you panicking then?”

“Yes,” she said.

I looked at Gemma and scoffed. “Did you know that same woman sent me a bike after I led the cops to her daughter’s body. Your mother wouldn’t even let me have it.”

Gemma looked stunned. “Of course. You helped bring her closure.”

“Even a stranger believed in my abilities, and she—” I looked her up and down. “—made me feel like a freak every chance she got.”

“I didn’t think you should be rewarded for doing what you did to that poor woman. You had to learn that was wrong. You don’t just blurt stuff out like that, even if it’s true.”

“Well, I learned, all right. Don’t you worry about me. Is this over yet?”

“No,” Gemma said. “Mom wants to explain.”

“I was just trying to teach you.”

“No.” I stood and paced. “No, you were so indifferent to me. You hated me. That’s not teaching. That’s punishing.”

“I never hated you.”

“You were completely indifferent to me. If not hate, then what?”

“I wasn’t indifferent.”

“You were a monster!” I yelled. “Why are you even here? Why are you even talking to me?”

Her shoulders shook a moment before she cleared her throat and tried to gather herself. No way was she making me the bad guy in all this. Tears may have worked on my dad, but they would not sway me an inch.

“I wasn’t indifferent, Charley.”

A humorless laugh escaped me.

“I was scared of you.”

I sighed, unable to believe she was pulling this shit.

“I was scared to death of you. You were something else, something … not human, and I was scared of you.”

“Oh, so now you believe in all this?”

“Please listen to her, Charley. It’s taken us a long time to get to this point.”

“So, you’ve been counseling her? Five syllables: antipsychotic. They do wonders.”

“You owe her at least a little of your time.”

“She treated me like shit my whole life. The only thing I owe her is my middle finger and a cold shoulder.”

“You’re right,” Denise said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“See?” I said to Gemma.

“If you will let me explain,” she said, “I will leave tonight and I will never come back if that is still your wish.”

“Can’t beat that with a stick. Shoot.”

Her cheeks were wet and her fingers shook as she stared down at her lap. “When I was little, my mother was in a car accident.”

Not her life story. Damn it. I had to pee. This could take forever.

“They had her in ICU. They’d stabilized her, so they let me and my dad in to see her. It was so scary seeing her hooked up to all those machines.”

I gazed longingly at the door, wondering if anyone would notice if I just slipped away for a few minutes. Beep was playing hopscotch on my bladder, and this was clearly going to take a while.

“My dad left to get coffee, and Mom woke up while he was gone. She looked at me sleepily and held out her hand right before the machines started going crazy. Her blood pressure dropped. The nurses and doctors came in and they tossed aside one of the blankets that was on her. A blue blanket.”

Blue wasn’t my favorite color.

“They were working on her, trying to bring her back. I guess she was bleeding internally. She woke up again while they were working on her, but the machines were still going crazy. She looked up at nothing and spoke. Just said things like, ‘Oh, oh, okay, I didn’t realize.’ She had a loving look on her face. When I looked over, I saw what she was talking to. An angel.”

I saw an angel once, too, but now probably wasn’t the time to bring it up.