My mom sits on her knees in the middle of the living room, her hands in her hair. This can’t be about the case, because everyone keeps saying we need to wait, that these things move slowly—we’re still months, maybe even years, away from any potential trial. I know things are dire, but I find myself unsympathetic. At the moment, I have little patience for her theatrics or her self-pity.

“Joy, what’s happening? Are you okay?” my dad asks, approaching her slowly, hands at his sides.

“They fired me,” she says, and looks to my father, like he’s the only person in the room. Unlike what many of my classmates seem to report about their own moms and dads (or moms and moms and dads and dads), my parents are, after twenty years of marriage, still solid. They bicker, obviously: My mom wishes my dad exercised more, my dad wishes my mom would look at her phone less, and they both think the other works too much. But most of the time, they truly seem like best friends in love. They kiss and go out on dates, and sometimes, late at night, I can hear them laughing as they stream a silly movie on the projector screen in their bedroom. I’d find it all icky, except I’ve seen the flip side with friends—weekends in different houses, testifying in court about who you want to live with, fights over child support payments—so I feel grateful that I’ve never once worried my parents would get divorced. Until now, we’ve been immune to that kind of misfortune.

“They all fired me. Blood Moon. That Biogurt commercial that was going to run in Japan. My agent said even Lifetime is shelving that ripped-from-the-headlines-murder-y thing. Twenty years of steady work, and poof! It’s all gone.”

“What about the—” My dad looks at the assembled lawyers and remembers that the resurrection of My Dad, My Pops, and Me by Netflix is still a carefully guarded industry secret. They haven’t announced to the trades yet.

“They’re writing Missy off. It’s over,” my mom says, and dissolves into tears all over again, which is how my mother cries, both in real life and onscreen. In discrete outbursts. My dad takes her into his arms and she clutches his shirt, twisting it in her fingers, the same way she did to her television husband on Blood Moon when he drank the potion that would reverse his immortality.