I shake my head and look down at the pile of laundry on the edge of the bed. It’s hard to tell whether it’s clean or dirty and smelling it doesn’t help matters.

“So, how is she? Is she everything you could have wanted?”

“She is…quite wonderful actually.”

“Oh, yeah, then why the hell did she give you up?”

“She didn’t. Her father took me away from her when she had an emergency C-section and she spent years looking for me. And he paid you a very generous amount to keep your mouth shut, didn’t he?”

This conversation is going well off kilter but I can’t help myself. Sometimes, the right thing has to be said even if it’s at the wrong time.

“That is not what happened,” my mother insists but the expression on her face says otherwise.

An emptiness comes into her eyes, the kind that’s difficult if not impossible to blink away. She tries but instead I see a small tear form somewhere in the corner. So, there it is, huh. Perhaps she is human after all.

“You got Owen arrested, didn’t you?” she says, clearing her throat and with one move erasing every last hope of humanity within her.

I don’t know how much she knows but I have nothing to hide.

“He attacked me, pretty badly. He stalked me. Tried to rape me. Probably wanted to kill me.”

My mom laughs and waves her hand as if I have just said the most unbelievable thing.

“Oh, please, you’ve always had such a flair for the dramatic.”

There has never been a statement that has been less true. Even as a kid, I hardly ever told stories, and made them up even more rarely. Tears come to my eyes but I push them away.

“Tell me about his girlfriend,” I say, pressing my nails into my thigh to stop myself from crying.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Everything.”

“They were in love, or thought they were. Then they broke up. Or maybe she broke up with him. Then he heard that she was dating someone else, your Nicholas. He heard stories about him, about how dangerous and volatile he could be. He didn’t want her to get hurt. He followed her a lot, trying to protect her. It didn’t work, I guess.”

The nonchalant way that she states these ‘facts’ send shivers up my spine. There is some truth in the story but she has reconstructed most of it in such a way that it's hard to tell what’s true and what’s false.