“That’s good. I hope she’s been taking care of you well.”

“She does her best.” Iris nodded, slightly dismissively. “I’ve got physiotherapy tomorrow. Then another session with my new neurologist, Dr. Burke—he’s working with a clinical trial on a new drug that’s looking promising and we’re going to discuss that. It’s supposed to stop the progressive demyelination process, but I don’t understand half the jargon in the report. Could you translate it for me?”

“Mother! You know I don’t do that stuff any more—I’m not current; I might miss something. Anyway, if you go telling your osteopath about me, he’ll panic. I’m not a bone doctor.”

“Well, if you say so.” Iris looked irritated. “All that time in medical school wasn’t wasted, was it?”

“No, Mom, I use it every day. I couldn’t do my job without it. I just don’t know enough about modern multiple sclerosis drug treatments to risk second-guessing your specialist, all right? I might get it wrong, and then who’d you sue?”

“If you say so.” Iris snorted. “You didn’t come here just to talk about that, did you?”

Damn, thought Miriam. It had always been very difficult to pull one over on her mother. “I lost my job,” she confessed.

“I wondered.” Iris nodded thoughtfully. “All those dot-coms of yours, it was bound to be infectious. Is that what happened?”

“No.” Miriam shook her head. “I stumbled across something and mishandled it badly. They fired me. And Paulie…Remember I told you about her?”

Iris closed her eyes. “Bastards. The bosses are bastards.”

“Mother!” Miriam wasn’t shocked at the language—Iris’s odd background jumped out to bite her at the strangest moments—but it was the risk of misunderstanding. “It’s not that simple; I screwed up.”

“So you screwed up. Are you going to tell me you deserved to be fired?” asked Iris.

“No. But I should have dug deeper before I tried to run the story,” Miriam said carefully. “I was too eager, got sloppy. There were connections. It’s deep and it’s big and it’s messy; the people who own The Weatherman didn’t want to be involved in exposing it.”

“So that excuses them, does it?” asked Iris, her eyes narrowing.

“No, it—” Miriam stopped.

“Stop making excuses for them and I’ll stop chasing you.” Iris sounded almost amused. “They took your job to protect their own involvement in some dirty double-dealing. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Well.” Iris’s eyes flashed. “When are you going to hang them? And how high? I want a ringside seat!”