“This is still America,” Dana snaps at her. “And I’m free to say my piece.”

She turns back to me, and my entire existence narrows into the tunnel centering this hateful old woman in my sight. I should leave. I should just turn around and march out the door. Yet I am paralyzed.

“You killed that baby,” she snaps, sparks of her hatred flying like spittle to sizzle on the floor. “If you didn’t kill her outright, then you killed her through neglect in the womb. Then you just abandoned her like garbage, and now you expect the good citizens of Clifford to pay for your mistake. To provide for a child you didn’t care enough about to take to the damn hospital. To keep alive. Assuming that’s really what the money’s even for.”

My skin buzzes, flies crawling over the rotting corpse of my dignity.

I can’t make my voice work. This is … This is …

“Utter crap,” Amira snaps. “Not a word of that is true.” She slams the flyers down on the countertop. “If any of you have a conscience, you can get instructions for how to donate to give an innocent baby a decent funeral right here. The rest of you can—”

Her mouth snaps shut, holding back profanity at the last second, as a bell hanging over the front door rings behind me.

“Fuck off,” I finish for her. “The rest of you can fuck off.”

“Well!” Dana gasps, glancing around at the other ladies as if to drive home her point that I’ve insulted her. That I am Trashy McTrasherson, from a long line of Trashersons.

That blood will out.

Then her gaze focuses on a point over my shoulder, and I get the prickly feeling that whoever’s just come in is staring at me.

“Beckett Bergen?” a new voice says, and I spin around to find a camera in my face held by a heavyset man in sagging jeans, with a massive headset over his ears.

“Are you Beckett Bergen?” the woman beside him repeats, holding a microphone inches from my face. She’s wearing a pale blouse and a bright red skirt, with some kind of laminated badge hanging around her neck. “Could we get a word on camera for WBBJ in Jackson?”

But it’s clear, since they came in right before I finished Amira’s sentence, that they’ve already gotten several words from me. Naturally, 27 percent of those words were expletives.

“She’s a minor,” Mindy snaps, rounding the counter with her hands waving in front of her. “Get out of here. And turn that camera off!”

She shoos the reporter and her cameraman out onto the sidewalk. Then Mindy turns to me, and I can see that her lips are moving. I can hear syllables coming from her mouth, but I can’t process them because they sound … stretched. Warped. As if she’s saying them in slow motion.