After this, the day will turn its attention to the grinding bureaucracy of our lives falling apart: meetings and phone calls and referrals and PowerPoint presentations. The PR and crisis folks and the lawyers will jockey for my mother’s attention, a constant tug-of-war from the living room to the dining room. PR almost always wins. My mom feels way more comfortable debating the merits of a People magazine cover interview vs. a tell-all exclusive with 20/20 than facing her legal situation.

She doesn’t want to learn about mandatory federal prison guidelines.

When the lawyers insist she sit down and listen, she cries weird silent tears that fall down her face in perfect straight lines.

“I can’t deal with this,” my mom says, which has become a frequent refrain in this house, and one I understand. She reaches for the bottle of Xanax, which now lives on the kitchen counter for easy access. Before, it lived in my mother’s medicine cabinet, the pills only making a sly appearance in her silver engraved pill case for long-haul flights.

Every day, the trouble grows with a terrifying momentum. My mom has been fired. My dad has a meeting with his board of directors next week, when he too is likely to lose his position. There’s talk of a $800 billion class-action lawsuit, a sum so outrageous, my father actually laughed when the lawyers mentioned the possibility. Hudson has been MIA doing God knows what, and we pretend not to be worried about him. We pretend not to think that he might be the other shoe that’s about to drop. We’ve canceled our trip to Mexico to celebrate my mom’s fiftieth birthday, since she had to surrender her passport as a condition of her bail.

I don’t care about the vacation, but I do think about her passport. I heard my parents murmuring about an account in the Cayman Islands, how maybe they could come up with a plan to leave the country if it became absolutely necessary. I’ve always liked Zurich, my mom said.

They stopped talking when they saw me. No one defined necessary.

I made the mistake of setting up a Google alert, and op-eds across the country celebrate the idea of my mom going to jail, declare her (and by extension me) a symbol of everything that is wrong with our country. Even debates that have nothing to do with us—immigration? health care?—somehow pivot back to the scandal, how the 1 percent take more than our fair share, how we hoard our privilege. How we’ve corrupted every system, that we are emblematic of a perversion of capitalism.

Off with our heads.