“He said you could get a sentence of twenty years,” I say. “That’s longer than I’ve been alive.”

“Actually more if you throw in a money-laundering conspiracy charge,” Mr. Spence says, and I can tell, for whatever reason, my mother refuses to acknowledge this possibility. Maybe she thinks he’s trying to scare us. If he is, it’s working on me. “Also tax fraud. If you wrote the donation off.”

“No one is going to put me in jail for twenty years for doing what I thought was best for my kid,” she says, not answering. “It’s not like I’m one of those antivaxxers who doesn’t care that they are putting children with cancer at risk for getting the measles. Come on. Find me a judge who’s a parent. Put me on the stand and I’ll have them weeping in minutes and convinced they’d have done the same exact thing for their kid.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Mr. Spence says. “We don’t get to choose our judge and we can rehearse, but we can’t urge you to lie.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Put me in, Coach. I’m an actress. I can make them understand.”

“Mom,” Isla says. “You know what a judge is going to think? They’ll think how unfair it is that their kid had to play by the rules when yours didn’t. Or maybe they’ll have a kid who needs a legitimate accommodation, who has a real disability, not a made-up case of ADHD, and because of you those will be harder to get now.”

Isla is unintimidated by this room full of lawyers or my mother. She’s riding that same wave of righteous indignation that has fueled angry op-eds across the country, all calling for us to get the book thrown at us, or maybe it’s more personal than that: She’s pissed because my greedy mother took her down too. I understand the rage, the desire to yell in my mother’s face, to ask her to get this part over with so we can move on to the next. I think this not-knowing has to be worse than whatever is to come. It’s the waiting that kills you.

Or maybe Isla is being Isla. Practical to the core. My mom should plead.

“And then what happens? We have to visit you in federal prison every weekend for twenty years. Take a plea and do a few months, Mom. Grow up. Take some responsibility,” Isla says.

“I didn’t know,” my mother says.

“Didn’t know? That’s all you and Dad and Chloe can say. I didn’t know. What does that mean? Tell me!” Isla is yelling, and the lawyers shuffle through files and stare at their phones to pretend they’re not watching this shitshow unfold. Or perhaps one of them is live tweeting our disaster in real time.