“There,” I said. “You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where you probably are. And no doubt Ms. Plimpton’s address is easily found on the Internet.”

“Oh Gloria,” said Bob derisively. “You might as well have hired a skywriter to draw a big arrow pointing to the house.”

Madeline Plimpton had put her head into her hands.

I said, “You’re banned.”

“I’m what?” Gloria said.

“If you can’t stop yourself from posting, you need to stay off the computer, your phone, whatever other device you may have, altogether. You’re exposing yourself. You’re putting yourself in danger.”

Gloria bit her lip again and turned away. “You don’t understand,” she said, putting both hands on the counter’s edge, supporting herself. “You don’t know what they’ve put me through.”

None of us said anything.

Without turning around, she said, “I let you all make a national laughing stock out of me. I’m mocked and ridiculed. The coddling, smothering mother who kept her child from learning right from wrong. Okay, it worked. Jeremy didn’t go to jail. And that’s good.”

Slowly, she turned around. Tears had traveled halfway down her cheeks.

“But I paid a price, too,” she said. “And now you want to keep me from telling the world I’m not the person they think I am.”

An unmoved Ms. Plimpton walked across the room, picked up the laptop and held it tightly under her arm.

Bob said, “Give me your phone, honey.”

Gloria looked as though Bob had just asked for a kidney.

“This is humiliating,” she said. “You have no right.”

I said, “I can’t protect Jeremy if there are leaks coming out of this very household as to his whereabouts.”

“You think I’d do anything to hurt my son?” Gloria asked me.

“Not intentionally,” I said. “But those postings are dangerous. Even if you don’t say anything specific, people can tell where you are when you write them.”

Bob said, “Come on, Gloria. Give me your phone.”

Gloria wasn’t ready to surrender. “I need a phone in case there’s an emergency. You get to have your phone, Bob, so you can do all your deals.”

“That’s different,” Bob said. “If I’m not making deals, then I’m not bringing in any money, and if I wasn’t bringing in money, how the hell would I have paid for your son’s defense?”

“I like the way you toss that in,” she said. “My son.”

“Well, he is your son. I think it shows how much you mean to me that I was willing to help him out despite that fact that he’s not mine.”

“I know, you’re a hero.” It was an out-and-out sneer. “You care so much about him.”

“Your phone?” Bob said.

“I don’t know where it is,” Gloria said, with little conviction.

Bob reached behind a decorative bowl on the island. “For Christ’s sake, it’s right here.”

She lunged for it, but she was too slow. Bob had snatched up the phone, which was in a pale pink cover with tiny white polka dots, and dropped it into the inside pocket of his sport jacket.